DC'S YOUNG ANIMAL: DOOM PATROL #1 RANT/REVIEW (no spoilers)

First thing first: Gerard Way is the frontman of My Chemical Romance.  I've never followed or cared about the band beyond the fact that a song by them ran over the end credits of the Watchmen movie and it really felt like a final stab of just how much Zack Snyder did not get a single thing about Watchmen... but I'm not going to hold that against them, it's just not my kind of sound and it was poorly placed.  I just want to be clear I'm not coming from any preconception against Way himself.

Now, as for my prejudice on Doom Patrol, well...

Grant Morrison became my favorite comic writer when I was in high school and Doom Patrol and the Invisibles were the two apexes of his work as far as I was concerned... The Invisibles was better, so much so that it was almost ridiculous... but I always liked the Doom Patrol better.  The world and characters were so diverse and insane and darkly comedic.  A lot of it admittedly has aged a little stiffy... I thought "Beard Hunter" was the funniest thing in world but it really was a product of the time... but by in large it is a true masterpiece and completely deserving of its company among Sandman and Moore's Swamp Thing.  They worked with the times the way the new original 60s Doom Patrol worked with the 60s comics.

Arnold's Doom Patrol took the color and strangeness of the early Marvel books and exploded the oddness of them.  The team fought brains in jars and heavily armed French gorillas and a man that is half dinosaur and has trees for arms and legs... It was a comment on the books that were coming out at the time, but it was also completely straight-faced with its absurdity and it also wasn't afraid to go a little darker... google the last issue if want to see what I mean.  I've scanned other takes on the book, but most of them seemed to miss the point and go from more standard superhero material.

Second, this is the flagship of DC's new "Young Animal" line.  Way is 39 and it's intentionally aping a book from 25 years ago... so it's kind of a confusing label. My guess is that it's meant to be a Young Adult line, but it also has a Mature Readers label, which... I was in middle school when I started reading Mature books, I think most of us were, but it's a vague enough label that I can see a retailer warning off parents... Especially since the label on DC's Vertigo books has traditionally been roughly equivalent to the R rating.  Also, the central character is in her early 20s, which hurts the YA classification further... I don't know.

Anyway, on the actual book:

First off, the book looks great.  The art by Nick Derington and especially the color by Tamra Bonvillan are fantastic and vibrant, but also change beautifully to match the tone of different scenes... It represents the ideal for this era just as well as the Richard Case artwork represents Richard Case artwork did the Morrison series.  It's worth picking up for the art alone.

Now, onto the story:

We're introduced Casey Brinke, a cute young EMT with freckles and boundless optimism.  Casey starts the story racing her ambulance to save an old man while giving her plucky hero speech about how she'll do everything she can to save lives and hinting at past alien experiences.   Later, her partner tries to set her up with son while she plays old school arcade games and engages in dialogue that is explicitly referred to as "perky/quirky" with the text itself.  Basically, Casey seems, at least so far, like a pretty stock Manic Pixie Dream Girl heroine... but she's well done and I was genuinely won over by her... although admittedly this character is right in my wheelhouse (my favorite Marvel character has pink hair and wings and is literally named Pixie, so... if it's not your thing, be warned).

I do have one issue with Casey, however.  Avoiding spoilers, at one point a character is killed in front of her and she doesn't seem to care too much.  This especially bothered me because she knew the character fairly well and isn't depicted as overly sad, upset, or angry at the person who did it... and she's an EMT!  I can kind of excuse it as her just being in shock as it's about the third insane thing to her in the space of few hours and she does seem baffled, but once again... she's an EMT!  Her job calls her to be able to stay cool in emergency situations, frequently violent ones piled one after another AND she said she has a history with bizarre events.  It's a little odd, especially since the death is essentially played for laughs which... death was always played seriously in Drake or Morrison... it was always disturbing.

The traditional leads Cliff "Robotman" Steele and Niles "Chief" Caulder make minor appearances, mostly to set up later plot.  Cliff is subtly epic, we meet him in the middle of a mission, and this is where the color and art really have a chance to shine: the world of Cliff's mission looks radically different than Casey's world, and I hope we get to see more artistic diversity like this.  Other recurring characters are hinted at.  At least part of the plot seems to focus on Morrison's character Danny the Street, with a new threat trying to harvest Danny for an attempt at satire which I'm going to have to reserve judgment on... the villains so far feel a little oddly Space Quest... which is a dated comparison, I know, but Way is the right age to grow up with those games... or maybe it's just on my mind because I watched a Let's Play by Yahtzee19.

Our other new character (so far) is Terry None.  She also seems to be kind of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl... but a different kind, I guess.  She wears cosplay telegram outfit with a black eye mask painted on, which... again, I approve of.  Some of her dialogue puts me in the mind of Mr. Nobody from the old series although I suppose she's meant to be a Harley Quinn or a spacier Zatanna.  She's a cute and fun character that has powers she doesn't seem to fully understand, but she seems to have more relevance to the developing plot. She hasn't gotten much space yet, but I like her character so far... even if so far her role seems to be the Other Quirky Girl in a singularly quirky book.

And tone is definitely quirky.  This is kind of a problem, since the tone of both the original Arnold Drake and the Morrison Doom Patrol is "strange."  Drake went for taking the strangeness inherent in the superhero genre while Morrison used it (often satirically) to comment on the horror tone of the proto-Vertigo books.  Also, in both the Drake and Morrison books, the Doom Patrol were emphasized as being disabled, physically, mentally or both.  Drake took the idea of Silver Age heroes as victims of industrial accidents and ran with it and Morrison took up the baton by adding the late 80s fixation with mental illness.  They are extremely damaged, to the point that Crazy Jane's origin story was built around her being sexually abused by her father... back when such things were unheard of in mainstream comics.  Cliff was the Everyman character and he was literally a brain in a jar.  Casey and Terry are cute girls with whimsical dispositions.  They're the kind of girls that, frankly, you might introduce your son to.  You could never do that with Crazy Jane.  Basically, if Arnold Drake's Doom Patrol was Carnival of Souls and Morrison's was Eraserhead, this is a later Tim Burton movie: you can see where it came from, but it's too bright and it kind of stole the visuals and missed the point.

That said, I really enjoyed this book and I can't wait for the next issue.  I really came to like Casey and Terry and I'm glad to have Cliff back.  I want to see where Way goes with the book and if he can make his Doom Patrol function as a new and worthy take on the team.  I can't say that about a single new series from DC in the last five years and there were several I approached with greater enthusiasm.  I hope this book has a good, long run and the ideas as fully developed and the characters have time to grow.  But at the very least, I want to see how Cliff is going to look when they put him back together.

Joseph Campbell vs. Sephiroth

I was re-watching some of Joseph Campbell's lectures for the first time since I was thirteen or fourteen and something I'd long forgotten about kind of jumped out me: there's a sequence when Campbell compares the Native American mythological traditions (I believe the Navajo, but I could be misremembering) with the Western traditions (that is, the Abrahamic religions). Campbell argued that the Native American beliefs where very much of their place and time and expressed a relationship with world around them that stressed harmony, while the current traditions of the West where based thousands of years ago by people with very different concerns and a very different frame of reference, and which stressed mastery over nature... which can only be dangerous to the world and which ultimately, he feels, leads to a state of disengagement from mythology.

Now, Campbell pointedly uses the word mythology, not religion, stressing that a mythology speaks to the psychology of its people and does not need to be explained. And, regardless of your faith, the fact remains that modern theology in the West is based around interpretation.

Now, my initial reaction to that was to think (again, dodging the whole question of religion in favor of mythology) if I could come up with a myth that spoke to our experience the way the Native American or Greek myths spoke to their experience.

And then I remembered Squaresoft made a video game that already did it.
For those of you that aren't familiar with the game... I have no idea why you're reading this... but I'll explain my argument: Final Fantasy VII is set in a world a bit closer to our own: one of increasing globalization where the few remaining cultural differences are being steadily stamped out by the interests of megacorporations. Most of the political and military figures we encounter are either puppets or extensions of corporate influence and much of the world is in a state of economic depression. The key conflict is, fittingly, humanity's struggle to exist as a part of nature. The megacorporations have been literally syphoning the Earth's lifeforce to power their machinations and our protagonists (including two endangered species) are set against them, accessing mystic powers tied directly to the planet.

The primary antagonist represents a primal fear linked to the modern world: nature threatens to turn against humanity and destroy it for its hubris and it is only by finding a way to live with nature (and it very significantly does not include a total rejection of technology (with all its gunarms and airships, but rather a more responsible use of it), are our protagonists able to save themselves and the world.

Again, I'm certainly not telling anyone to start worshiping Cloud Strife, but you can't tell me that doesn't speak more to the world you're leaving in.

I still think Final Fantasy 6 is better, though.

And this is why I quit reading comics (again)

Every so often I get curious as to what's going on with comic books at the time. And then I check it out and it's invariably something like this:











Remember when you were a kid and you broke the arm off one of your toys accidentally and had to create this huge back story for it? I think that must have happened to everyone at DC Comics all the time.

Little Big Planet: Late Reactions

Little Big Planet: Early Reactions

Recently I sold a stack of Xbox360 games (somehow I ended up with the collector's edition of Skyrim that came with the giant dragon... I didn't even like Oblivion, so I'm a bit confused by my own reasoning) at my local Exchange, and with the funds I purchased a used PS3 and a Playstation Network card. It was, honestly, something of a whim, but I'd been pretty dissatified with the virtual console library on the 360, and if the past has been any indicator, there is no end to the amount of times I'm willing to buy Mega Man 2 & 3 and Final Fantasy 6 & 7. There was however, one exclusive PS3 title I was really looking forward to playing: Little Big Planet.

Now, I know I'm coming into this extremely late in the game, there's already a sequel available (which is currently very likely to be the SECOND PS3 title I purchase), but that's kind of the point: I'm entering a world and community that is already very well-established and densely populated... a very different experience than I would have gotten had I started on the ground floor.

The story mode of LBP is just about perfect... the physics, the platforming, the adorableness... all of it narrated by Stephen Fry in the warmest, most welcoming voice possible... if the game was just that, I could easily rate it as the best new property I've played in years... but that's not really what LBP is all about. Right from the beginning, the game is all about customization, giving you costumes and stickers and new materials to make Sackboy (our adorable protagonist) out of, and once you clear the first set of levels, they open the level-making tools so that you can build your own levels and share them online, and clearly this is where the game expects you to spend most of your time (when I went back to the story mode, Stephen Fry seemed more than a little surprised, and seemed to think I had done it by accident). Now, this is somewhat understandable: the story setting is rather small and insubstantial given the vast array of worlds I could build or the exploration of worlds made by other users I could explore... I could (and currently intend to) subsist solely on LBP for my gaming fix basically indefinitely with all the user-made content out there to play (there's even a job out there for someone to just review user-made levels full-time... a repeative job that would be eventually degenerate to evaluated the quality of the stickers any given level gives you, but still..)

There is a problem where, whenever I'm about to praise a level for an ingeneous bit of platforming of physicsplay I realize they're actually just taking advantage of tools and abilities already provided and showcased to them, and it is disappointing the number of levels I've seen that felt the need to employ the paintenator (the only "gun' option I'm aware, which is from the DLC) given the ability to build anything. The trends I've noticed with the user-made content so far tend to be towards turning Sackboy into other, more-established video game characters and this is somewhat upsetting, because even when I'm enjoying a particularly well-structured Castlevania-themed level (and it was great, EmiliatheSage, hats off to you), I'm still struck by the fact that it's taking a fresh (to me at least) IP and replacing it with something a little more tried-and-true. The DLC seems to promote this as well, with material built mostly around other games (tellingly mostly T or M rated games) and comic book characters (who might as well be video game characters at this point). It's a bit disappointing that given all this freedom to create, the drive is still towards the tired and familiar.

Still, the ability to create levels is brilliant, prolongs playability basically indefinitely, and is deeply rewarding. Somewhere there are boxes full of banner printer paper full of the masochistic platform levels I designed at Daycare after school when my age was in the single digits... I'm currently planning a gauntlet of hundreds upon thousands of fatal deathtraps and swinging rope timing jumps, with the solely reward being a sticker of myself with the words "Good on You," but I must admit, I've not yet experimented much with building my own levels... with all the best toys safely locked away in the story mode (or downloadable content), my options are somewhat limited for the time being... in a way, it's just as well. For as much as I enjoyed turning Sackboy into Shakespear or giving him the ears of a rabbit, zebra-stripes, and cat eyes, he seemed less endearing and (ironically enough) he lost a lot of character. Which I guess is part and parcel with putting him in old Mega Man games, but..

I've been trying to express exactly what my reaction to Little Big Planet has been and it continually eluded me until I finally realized to my shock and bewilderment that more than anything else it made me happy, which is a reaction to a video game I find puzzeling and basically unprecedented. I've been playing video games for literally longer than I can remember and while I have always enjoyed them, often gotten a sense of achievement from them or been absorbed in a world or the characters that lived there or found myself basically addicted, I could not honestly think of another game that made me genuinely happy by itself, without being part of a large experience of memory. It might actually be my favorite new game in the last decade.

Now I have to go copy a 20 year old Mega Man level.

Why I Stopped Reading A Broom to the System

Why I Stopped Reading David Foster Wallace's

A Broom to the System

This is everything you need to know about A Broom To The System and subsequently why I stopped reading it 200 some pages from closing: there is a scene in a Gilligan's Island themed bar where a character is on a date with an inflatable woman.

And yes, she does pop and fly around the room like a deflating balloon.

When I first starting reading this book, it was under the misconception that this was David Foster Wallace's last book and was published posthumously in 2008. When I realized it was actually his first book published in 1987, I thought perhaps I should reevaluate my criticisms, but then I realized Gilligan's Island jokes and rubber girlfriends were probably hackneyed then, too. Wait, let me review the Tom Hanks film "Bachelor Party." Yeah... seems pretty outdated there, too.

As a whole, this work feels woefully outdated, like one an early 60s "collision course with wackiness" farce ala Myra Breckinridge (the film, not the book) or Casino Royale (the one with Woody Allen, not Daniel Craig)... and if you've ever tried to go back and watch those films, it really makes you wonder about the potency or the drugs being passed around. There's a city shaped like Jayne Mansfield, psychiatrist joke upon psychiatrist joke, and it's dialogue seems frankly ridiculous coming out real people in what is supposed to be 1990 and not a dirty joke book from the hazy pre-Kennedy days.

In fact, the book it most reminds me of is Terry Southern's Candy, the only other book I can remember ever being legitimately angry with. It shares the same griminess, ugliness, and feeling that the author sees every man in the world as a date-rapist and finds that both acceptable and hilarious. Granted, that book at least had the common decency to be short, while this book is nearly 500 pages with no ending.

Also, Candy Christian at least has a character. It's the character of a glove that feels its providing hands a valuable service that it gains no true enjoyment of, but it's still a personality of sorts. The protagonist of A Broom to the System, Lenore Beadsman, is more of a vague amorphous thing... that gets a line of dialogue when David Foster Wallace remembers we're meant to be following her story. She's introduced as a fifteen year old girl visiting her older sister's college dorm, there she's quickly shone in contrast to the older, more experienced girls to be somewhat confused and naive. A group of drunken frat boys (the first of our many date-rapist) bursts into the dorm and proceeds to tease, harass, and ultimately threaten the girls into signing their buttocks as a fraternity initiation stunt. All of the girls are bullied for several ugly pages until they finally capitulate except Lenore who, despite being the youngest and least experienced, repeatedly insisting on leaving until the boys give up and let her. It's a scene that really establishes

who Lenore is as a character.

It belongs in a different book.

Adult Lenore has no real personality, being completely dominated by every other character in the book, mostly men who in some way possess her, but also her own great-grandmother (who, in what I'm sure is meant to be a hilarious detail is literally cold-blooded), virtually every line of dialogue assigned to her is asking clarification. She even sleeps with the frat boy date-rapist at one point, and he has in no way reformed himself over the years, (far from it, having just thrown out his wife (one of the other girls he assaults in the opening chapter) because she has "run out of holes"). Now, this might be intentional. There's a recurring thread where she wonders about fictional characters and their ability to think and feel anything more than what's assigned to them, so perhaps I could be accused of missing the point... but on the other hand, I'm supposed to being willing to follow this character for 500 pages and the fact that she's utterly bland and uninteresting isn't made any easier by it being "on purpose."

The real protagonist is Lenore's boss/lover the hilarious named Rick Vigorous. Rick is like Humbert Humbert, but sleazier and less likable. Completely serious, Humbert is at least a master of the language and has the added benefit of the author being aware he's writing a monster. Every line coming out of Rick makes you

want to smack him, which is a problem since he also acts as the narrator. A frustrated publisher, Rick spends his time criticizing bad college fiction pieces, which, ironically, is exactly what it feels like he lives in. Riddled with inadequacies despite having a well-paying pet job and a much younger girlfriend that inexplicably adores him, Rick goes on long tangents about his ex-wife and his gay son (and, yes, they are very homophobic and, yes, we are meant to agree with him) and the thirteen year old neighbor he lusted after, that increasingly push Lenore out of her own book. As I got further into the book, I found myself skipping more and more of these segments, getting back to the plot-relevant sections about Lenore and her brother making bad jokes about the Bob Newhart Show.

Then I realized what I was doing and stopped reading all together.

So, I read one to three novels a week and I think I get in a fairly diverse reading list (I went from Garcia Marquez to the Quaran to Amy Tan one week), and I think I "get" at least most of what I'm reading. I understan

d that this is a deeply meta-textual work... but that doesn't make it any good. In fact, since meta is incredibly hard to do without seeming cheesy or contrived (and I grew up watching Tiny Toons, I learned bad meta-referencing before I learned the three act structure), it's almost a strike against it from the outset. The characters are alternately non-existent or completely unlikable, the dialogue universally makes me question if David Foster Wallace ever saw much less spoke to another human being, and the whole mess really just made me angry, like I was legitimately fighting the book.

I've read Nabokov, I've read Thomas Pynchon, this is neither of them. This is just a mess.

I do like that there was a character named Mindy Metalman.

Oddly Specific!

All Naruto! (Well, mostly...)

All Thor!

But none of it compares to the sheer majesty of Bedazzled Penguin.

IN AMERICA.

Ironically, two weeks ago this was all Will and Kate merchandise.