"Nothing Ever Really Ends"

The phrase originated as a thought-provoking statement. But having looked over DC Comics' Doomsday Clock by Geoff Johns & Gary Frank it seems to be repurposed into a threat.

I didn't really want to read Doomsday Clock, but as a contributor to The Grand Comics Database I read a little bit of anything - anything which isn't already indexed at the GCD. I noticed they lacked indexing on the three Doomsday Clock trades (one 2 volume hardcover set and one complete softcover collection). I put holds on them at my library and received them immediately - a little odd, considering it's one of the 'hot' comics of 2020 and I'm currently about one month in on my wait for Jonathan Hickman's first X-Men trade.

I had no great expectations for this comic. I'm one of those who think Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' Watchmen was a perfect comic that could only be diminished by revisiting. If DC characters must meet Watchmen characters (and they don't have to, no), then that issue of The Question where the Question tries to imitate Rorschach is about as far as I'd like to see it go.

It's a very slavish attempt to recreate Watchmen's format - 12 issues, told mostly in 9-panel grids, text features in the back. These are creative decisions Johns & Frank would never have made on their own - it's simply parroting what fandom expects from a Watchmen comic. The entire project is a very safe one, a conservative attempt to have the characters' universes brush up against each other. Moore & Gibbons' complex storytelling where words & images were deftly intertwined is not recreated.

And indeed, if you want a conservative DC Comics writer you could look no further than Geoff Johns. 20 years ago he was a mere fanboy-turned-writer. But in these twenty years he's... not changed, really. He was the company's Chief Creative Officer prior to writing this series. But I was struck by how much Doomsday Clock reads like his 20-year old JSA comics. Not because the JSA cast are here (although they are) but because he still writes his conflicts to a point where the solution to the problem (for some reason) is a double-page spread of various super heroes posing.

There might be a great story to be told about how Watchmen influenced the direction of the DC Comics characters even before the company tried to fuse them into a shared universe. But considering the tone the series is going for -- the attempt to be reconciliatory towards the two universes -- it shouldn't have been written by a fan service writer. As Moore's own reaction to Watchmen's popularity was to move from deconstruction to reconstruction, I feel a better story could have been told by a reconstruction writer -- that is, Kurt Busiek, Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Tom Peyer or someone of their ilk. Doomsday Clock takes the path of least resistance. It's the sort of comic where, if the Joker should appear, the 9-panel grid has to be abandoned because, wow, the Joker, oh my goodness, who could have imagined seeing the Joker in a DC Comics book, my expectations are shattered.

Ultimately I realize I am not the target audience for Doomsday Clock. To be fair, no one in comics fandom is the target audience. The target audience is the executive board of Warner Bros.

On Being in Bed with an Elephant

"Democracy doesn't work."

Almost a decade ago I heard those words from one of my co-workers as we were having coffee. It was unusual for us to be speaking about politics - I can't recall what I said to prompt her reaction. "What the people really want," she asserted, "is a strong leader."

She had almost 4 decades of experience more than me and had been born in Hong Kong so I wasn't sure how much of her viewpoint was generational and how much of it was cultural, but I was stunned to hear someone speak so dismissively about democracy. I was, I suppose, inclined to think of Martin Luther King Jr.'s adage that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice" and assumed that meant we (humans) were becoming more just and more democratic as time went on.

The US election in 2016 really unnerved me. It challenged what I thought about democracy and justice and what that nation's beliefs supposedly were. For some reason, I came down hard on the television series The West Wing. I recall shortly after the election that I got into a rant while speaking to one of my friends. My argument was, "why would anyone ever watch The West Wing again?"

The West Wing was an extremely optimistic program when it came to politics. Generally, politicians who were exposed as charlatans and hypocrites would slink off, never to be seen again. Politicians who opposed the White House's policies would do so in good faith, standing on a principle which conflicted with their goals. The opposing party could be brought around by a persuasive argument rooted in their common beliefs and goals.

So my argument was: none of that is true about the USA. The contempt one half of that country has for the other -- the irrational self-destructive hatred -- renders all of The West Wing's high ideals meaningless. I not only questioned their present commitment to democracy, I began questioning whether they were ever truly interested in democracy.

After that I picked a fight with another friend, this one a former poli-sci student. There I argued that the entire discipline of poli-sci was meaningless if any uneducated boor could attain the highest office on earth by merely appealing to populism. My friend fired back that, in fact, he found the election of Trump had made his poli-sci easier to teach in the classroom. When courts refused to back Trump's orders it provided useful examples of how the US government branches functioned.

I had allowed myself to become very anti-US in my outlook. I posted on Facebook on the day of Trump's election that I wanted my nation to find a new "best friend". I was not making a joke. And the darkest place I went to in that time was deciding the 'good' side of Trump's election was that it would hasten the collapse of the USA.

In retrospect, what I wanted was to see that country humbled - chastened - humiliated, perhaps. I wanted to see them lose prestige and somehow that was the worst-case scenario in my head. I did not foresee the 'Muslim ban', the children in cages, the catastrophic death toll from COVID-19 or the attempted coup. So although those events were the ugliest of all 'ugly American' attitudes I have ever experienced, more and more I came feel for all of those were suffering. That has helped me to expunge some of my anti-US sentiments.

Earlier this week I put on my DVDs of The West Wing for the first time in... what, 5 years? It wasn't consciously because I felt differently about that country or wanted to somehow commemorate the inauguration of their new president. I was simply scanning my DVD shelves, saw the boxed sets and thought, "why not? Maybe it will hold up after all."

It does hold up.

2020 Review 4/4: Television

I don't often have much to say about television on this blog. I think in the last decade or more I haven't taken much interest in television series. It's especially hard to sustain interest in programs when, as is often the case now, entire seasons drop on a single day, leaving no room for anticipation or speculation about the future. With that in mind, here are a few shows I genuinely enjoyed:

The Mandalorian seems to be most people's reason for subscribing to Disney+ and, indeed, it's a fine program. I do find it could use a lot more variety in the sort of stories it tells, but it sustains my interest. The casting on the show is neat, as they keep casting actors who haven't been big names for years but are very welcome to see again. It's the only thing Star Wars seems to be doing well.

I had heard Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was about the worst super-hero television program on the air, so it was a surprise to discover it was actually very good - easily the best live action Marvel series I've seen. It was uneven, especially at the start and during its 6th year, but overall I'm glad I finally watched it - it's nowhere near as numbing as trying to watch the latter-day Netflix shows.

At the same time I tried Agent Carter which was good; I found the second season instantly forgettable but the first year was pretty strong.

Finally, I dug into all the Ken Burns documentaries I hadn't seen, the biggest of which was Jazz. Being mostly unaware of the history of jazz music I really learned a lot from the film and came away with a number of songs and short films I looked up on my own.

In all, I found plenty of entertainment in 2020 despite circumstances and I'm sure I'll find a lot to enjoy in 2021.

2020 Review 3/4: Comics

Since leaving Marvel Comics I haven't been as devoted to following comics as I once was, but I certainly still read quite a few books.

My interest in Christopher Priest's work has of late brought to (of all things) Vampirella and Sacred Six. They're both interesting because of the style Priest uses to tell a story. He's certainly still very much wedded to non-linear storytelling!

Usagi Yojimbo continues to be a fine book, as expected. This last year included a storyline where Usagi returned to his home village which led to some fine reunions with long-absent characters and revisiting much of the series' lore.

I got into Garth Ennis' war comics in a bit way during 2020. I read his recent graphic novel Stringbags which motivated me to go back and read all of his Battlefields, Sara and World of Tanks comics. I appreciate how his stories depict the best and the worst aspects of human nature.

Although I don't read much from super hero comics these days, I did finally read Immortal Hulk by Al Ewing and instantly recognized why that series is being talked up as one of Marvel's finest, and why Ewing has won so much praise in the last few years. It's frequently a disgusting horror comic but Ewing's ability to ground his ideas in established continuity while coming up with new takes on Hulk lore is very impressive, as is Joe Bennett's art, which goes to places I didn't know he could handle. I also enjoyed Mark Waid's Black Widow, whose espionage focus was a little different from his usual hangouts; and Waid's Dr. Strange, which brought back my old favourite Dr. Druid!

I spent a lot of time in 2020 going over the works of Rick Geary, particularly his Treasury of Victorian Murder and other historical books. His ability to dispassionately recount the events of famous crimes is very engrossing. I hope there are more works like these from him to come.

Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics by Tom Scioli was a terrific biography of Kirby and long-since due. I read Angola Janga primarily out of interest in Angola - which the story doesn't really relate to, but I'll cover it in an upcoming review. And I read the first volume of the Lady Snowblood manga, which is a stylish crime series.

Other great books I read included Walter Simonson's Ragnarok, the continued work of Larry Hama on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and an excellent biography of Rod Serling titled Twilight Man.

Tomorrow: television!

2020 Review 2/4: Books

I read very heavily throughout 2020; the pandemic caused various libraries to expand their digital offerings, so access to interesting books has never been easier! Of all that I read, I can divide into four basic categories: fiction, Africa, Christian, and everything else.

FICTION: I read two interesting thrillers by Eric Ambler: The Light of Day and Dark Frontier. Dark Frontier was an earlier book and something of a satire which made it a bit of fun, while The Light of Day was a neat crime story where a driver gets blackmailed into working with criminals, then blackmailed by the other side to spy on his comrades. Deadline at Dawn by Cornell Woolrich is a great suspense novel about a man who committed a robbery but repented, only to return to the crime scene and find the victim has been murdered during the interval; his only hope is to find the killer before the body is found. The Bride Wore Black is another great Woolrich novel, this one concerning a woman with a carefully-plotted scheme to murder the men who wronged her and get away with it. The Princess Bride by William Goldman had long been a film I loved but I finally delved into the novel and enjoyed it a lot, it's very warm and funny much like the film. The pandemic inspired me to read Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain, which is an extremely well-crafted thriller. I read up on a number of Halo novels, the best of which were Halo: First Strike & Halo: Ghosts of Onyx by Eric S. Nylund and Halo: Contact Harvest and Shadow of Intent by Joseph Staten; I've been a Halo fan for so long, I'm amazed that the books keep bringing up new ideas I hadn't considered and offer information which casts the events of the games in a different light. I read The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle despite my general disinterest in H. P. Lovecraft, but as LaValle had crafted a meta-commentary on Lovecraft in this book it was a welcome and (I think) long-since necessary examination of how he wrote about black people.

AFRICA: No One Can Stop the Rain by Karin Moorhouse was a memoir by two doctors who served in Angola during the civil war; obviously, with my own interest in Angola, I found a lot of familiar moments in the book and I appreciated their particular outsiders' perspective on the nation and its people. African Perspectives on Colonialism by A. Adu Boahen had a great look at colonialism from the perspective of African authors, a perspective the other books I read on colonialism had lacked. Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley was concerned mostly with Portugal's activities in India but it also relates their early history in Africa and explains why their empire had the oddly uneven distribution that it did. The Fear by Peter Godwin was a memoir about the author's view of Mugabe's Zimbabwe in what ultimately has proven to be the decline of Mugabe's reign. The Lost Cities of Africa by Basil Davidson is a pretty forward-looking book for 1959 as the author attempted to vouch for Africa's rich pre-colonial history. An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World by Mariana Candido is a history of the slaving industry in Angola's port Benguela. Despite my interest in Angola I frequently found it to be dry and heavy on statistics, but there were interesting historical snippets explaining how deep the slave trade ran in Angola. The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis is a tough look at how capitalism is depleting Africa's resources with little in return; it's one I'm going to recommend. I read The Lion of Judah in the New World by Theodore M. Vestal for a grounding on US attitudes towards Ethiopia's Haile Selassie to help me with an essay I'm planning - as I'd hoped, the book made good points on Selassie's appeal in the USA. The Decolonization of Africa by David Birmingham was a strong book on the end of colonialism, although it spoke more in generalities than specifics.

CHRISTIAN: Letters Never Sent by Ruth van Reken was a series of letters written by a missionary woman across her life - lettters expressing all the things she felt growing up but couldn't express. As I'm going into missions I felt it was important to hear about the kinds of challenges she faced. Washed and Waiting by Wesley Hill is a memoir of the author's experiences as a celibate Christian gay man; homosexuality is a thorny issue in the church but this book takes a sort of centrist view which is definitely different. The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer is a fine meditative book on awareness of God in day-to-day living.

EVERYTHING ELSE: Reinventing Hollywood by David Bordwell had an interesting perspective on the challenging storytelling methods used in 1940s Hollywood films. The Phantom Unmasked by Kevin Patrick made a strong case for the Phantom as the first true super hero and had a strong case for why he's been denied that honour. Writing with Hitchcock by Steven DeRosa looked at Hitchcock's relationship with screenwriter John Michael Hayes. It was a strong examination of Hitchcock's strengths and failings and what made Hayes such a good collaborator for him. Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury is a series of short essays on writing which Bradbury composed across decades of his life. At his best, Bradbury is very inspirational and his guidelines have helped inspire me for years. Inside Benchley was the last of Robert Benchley's humour books which I had to read and I had a lot of laughs getting through the book. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow is the book the musical Hamilton is based on and as I've never really been taught much about US history it was particularly good to get a grounding in events I only vaguely understood. Recent current events led me to Umberto Eco's Five Moral Pieces, mostly to read his essay on fascism which explained the concept more fulsomely than anything else I've read. The Complete War of the Worlds by Alex Lubertozzi is primarily a history of Orson Welles' radio adapation of H. G. Wells' story, but it contained a terrific history of both works. Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic by Hilton Tims is a fine biography of the author, a little light on what made him a great author but shed a lot of light to me on how his life inspired his works.

Tomorrow: Comics!

2020 Review 1/4: Films

As usual I'm going to look back on the films, books, comics and television programs I most enjoyed in the last year. In the midst of all the terrible things in the world today a little bit of positive thought can't hurt. I let my streaming video apps lapse in 2019, thinking I'd be overseas for most of 2020. Still, thanks to streaming video at my work, through my public library's Kanopy account and a friend's gift of Disney+ I still saw quite a lot of movies.

1917 was the only movie I watched in the cinema during 2020. The attempt to create a 'single take' film is artificial, but adds to the film's suspense and sense of unease. It's in the Hitchcock tradition (ala Rope) and I quite enjoyed it.

Kanopy has a heavy emphasis on world cinema; some great international films I saw were Beauty and the Beast, the great French adaptation of the fairy tale; O Heroi, an Angolan film about a one-legged veteran and an orphan boy both trying to find a place in post-war Angola; The Loyal 47 Ronin, a great version of the Japanese historical incident; and A Separation, an Iranian film with a surprisingly compelling interpersonal conflict that kept me enthralled.

As a fan of classic cinema there aren't many great films left for me to see, but in 2020 I found a few notable ones: Intruder in the Dust, a surprisingly frank look at racism for 1949; Pygmalion, the fine 1938 adaptation of the play; and True Confession, a great screwball comedy which did a lot to help me glean why Carole Lombard was such a great comedienne.

I saw a number of great documentaries during 2020: I Am Not Your Negro on the life of James Baldwin; The Great Buster on the life of Buster Keaton; Hearts and Minds about the USA's pull out of Vietnam; A Time for Burning, a phenomenal picture about racial tension in Nebraska and the church's inability to confront the problem; Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann on the life of the great film composer; and Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles.

Some other strong films I saw were To Build a Fire, an adaptation of Jack London's story; the Disney sequels Toy Story 4 and Incredibles 2; Mr. Holland's Opus; Reginald Hudlin's bio-pic Marshall, which I sought out after Chadwick Boseman's death; the political film Game Change; and Hamilton (which I'll review on its own soon).

Tomorrow: Books