A Quick Shazam Review - Actual, Earnest Fun

I'll keep this simple because Shazam works great when you see it with no expectations at all; the trailers do not do this film justice, and as a result I was pleasantly surprised that it...

A. Had an actual story
B. Was actually well thought out, carefully written and filmed
C. Was actually fun!

I mean, I'm a DC fan at heart (unapologetic) and expected to enjoy this movie, but Shazam did something even the best comic films sometimes have trouble with: it managed to faithfully adapt the character to the big screen for a moderrn audience in a way which was both true to the underlying characters and tales and also resonates well with today's audience. No small feat!

If you were worried that the trailers suggested this would be a cheap Seth McFarland-esque style comedy romp, fear not; the trailers lie, and lie well. There's humor, yes, but this movie felt to me like it deserved a place in the subgenre defined by movies like Ghostbusters and the Goonies as much as any superhero film.

I'll offer no details or spoilers, it's better to see this movie straight up with no knowledge going in if possible. In the Thursday night showing I was in, every kid in the crowd cheered and clapped at least twice during the showing...when was the last time you saw kids (actual kids!) getting that excited over a movie? It was such a fun, earnest experience....absolutely worth it.

For those with kids, do note it's closer to PG-13. There's one spot where some bad CEOs get eaten, and a bit of swearing (the s word) but if you think, "same genre as Goonies" you'll understand. Totally fine for my 7 1/2 year old to see it, and he wants to see it again.

A+++ best DC movie to date, hands down, and better than most Marvel films, too.

P.S. stick around for the mid-credits twist, DC is diving deep down the rabbit hole of its traditional comics weirdness, no holds barred. Speaking of which, I need to blog about the awesomeness that is Doom Patrol soon.

Titans Trailer

Okay, I'm officially getting really psyched for this. It doesn't help that I am at last catching up on the rest of the DC Universe TV offerings (plowing through Arrow and the Flash right now). But yeah, I can get behind this version of the Titans:

Justice League and Wonder Woman Trailers

...Yes, it is a great time to be a DC Fan:



I was wondering if their choice for Barry Allen (the Flash) would work, but seeing him in this trailer? Absolutely.

New Batman V. Superman Trailer

This trailer is much better, and sheds more light on what the film will be about....



So...The Zuckerberg Luthor is okay, I can live with that. Zod as a reanimated Doomsday? Interesting. Wonder Woman's surprise appearance: amazing. Still keen to see what the new Aquaman is going to be like. (Also still wishing they tied all of this to the Flash/Arrow continuity....sigh)

It's starting to look like 2016 really will be a great year for DC fans!

Long Day - Rifts, Hasbro and DC's Convergence among other musings

Today is going to be a long day: 24 hours without sleep now. Long story, too much "other" for this blog but I am looking forward to crashing later for a few hours before game begins. Ai!!!! So a random medley post doay:

Rifts
The Savage Worlds edition of Rifts I mentioned really is a shocker. I still can't believe that Palladium consented to allow this. It won't quite feel the same though without a long monologue in each book from Kevin explaining that the original manuscript was amazing but he still had to rewrite it entirely to suit his vision of Book X.

Hasbro on D&D
Hasbro's news that D& D "on a real tear" was cool but I am still amused that it was also grouped with Clue, Candy Land and other games in the Hasbro inventory in terms of where it stands in the corporate report. This led me to wonder if maybe somewhere deep in Hasbro's corporate network is a division of 7 dedicated developers working furiously to make Candy Land new and innovative, all glaring over at the WotC team for setting the bar to a new high.

DC's Convergence
Anyone following DC's Convergence mini-epic running this month and next? No? I'm guessing a lot of older fans habitually dodge all newer iterations of an old product without compelling evidence to do otherwise, but I happen to be a fan of the New 52 DC universe and also still a fan of (most of) the pre-New-52 universe (I followed the post-Crisis DC from around 86 through to 2000 before I finally burned out). The Convergence event, which I am told is actually a cover for DC to move its headquarters to California and not worry about having their comic lineup interrupted, is a storyline about entire cities of various realms of the DC multiverse which have been kidnapped to a distant universe where Braniac is collecting "dead cities." This has been an recurring theme for several storylines now in DC's New 52, and pretty much most of the recent weeklies (New 52 Future's End and Earth2: Future's End) have been building up to it. Anyway, this frame gives the DC authors an excuse to revisit dozens of older DC universes and cancelled books. So far it's been a real menagerie, but an unusual number of their entries date to sometime in the mid 00's prior to the major universe-revisionism that went on or back to the late 80's, when I really got into DC. It's a fun trip down memory lane but in a modern context; the interesting thing is going to be seeing what changes, if any, this new approach has on other DC books going forward.

Marvel's doing something similar with its Secret Wars, which appears to be a muddy mess of various miniseries revisiting key moments in Marvel's history while using the end-of-the-universe event they've been building up to in the Avengers titles for years now as a frame. The end result, I predict, will look alarmingly close to the Marvel Cineverse, but I could be mistaken....still, I'm going to dodge most of the Secret Wars titles as it looks like a ridiculous mess and honestly I haven't been "back" to Marvel since the early 80's, so for most of these spin-off titles they are referencing events that took place during the decades that I was almost exclusively in to either DC, Image, or Jodorowksi comics.

Plus, there are a lot of comics for these two events coming out from Marvel and DC both. For the sake of my budget a decision had to be made: and I decided it was more fun to follow the Convergence.

On Reading and Collecting Comics in 2014 (Part I)

Taking a break from writing about RPGs for a bit to talk....comics!

Drinking from the comic book fire hose is never a good thing. You can drown in the sea of Marvel and DC comics (never mind the cornucopia of independents, Dark Horse, Image and others!) and after a while reality begins to warp....the fourth wall starts to loom large, preferably in the reading of the comics and not the real world, but hey....you never know!

This rant was sparked by doing precisely that: I've spent the better part of the last 18 months getting back into comics in a manner consistent with the way it used to be for me, from an era when almost all of my entertainment came from RPGs, comics, and an occasional theatrical release.

For one reason, comics are actually easily digested in relatively short bursts, and are surprisingly easy to get into and also put down when distractions arise....and I have a lot of distractions with my son, to use an example. For another, it's going to be fun to be able to hand over a ton of comics to him in years to come when he needs reading inspiration. I was hit hard by the awesomeness of comics when I was about 8 years old, and it was the single greatest motivator toward improving my reading skills at the time (outside of a cherished tome on Bigfoot, Nessie and UFOs I dragged everywhere).

For another reason, I spend a lot of time in a stressful position tied to the unholy commingling of the medical insurance industry and accounting/auditing. It's an industry I've grown to master, but I am very careful to compartmentalize work and life as much as possible; bringing this stuff home only leads to an early grave, I feel. Comics are a great destresser, even better than video games because you can generally get more plot in 22 pages than you get in 12 hours of your average FPS.

Anyway, as the last year and a half has progressed I've reached the point where I think I'm buying more books per month than I can easily consume, and I probably should cut down. It's hard, though....stopping a good title because its superfluous is harder than dropping one because it's poorly written or uninteresting. Sometimes a book has a weird thing going for it and you just want to see where it ends up (I'd call that the Grant Morrison Factor). Other times you just want to get the whole story, and comic publishers are still up to their old tricks where they find ways to tie the whole "Summer extravanganza" into multiple titles that practically command you get them all to make sense of what has happened.

In fact that last marketing strategy was a huge reason for my decline in interest in comics in the 90's....the cross-referential story lines made it too painful to keep up. I was pretty much just an Image fan for the first half of the 90's, enjoying the shared universe and interesting and more modern character designs and themes of Wildcats, Grifter, Cyberforce, Youngblood and Spawn before the entire thing blew apart and left a smoking crater where a decent comic universe used to exist. Now...it doesn't matter so much. I'm keeping up with Marvel's Original Sins titles just fine, thanks to making a godawfully larger amount of money now than I did in the nineties (duh) and also DC's Batman Eternal and "Future's End" books, which have the decency to be largely self-contained in exchange for having a weekly release schedule for an entire year. Yowza.

The last time I had it "this good" in comics as a reader and collector would have to be roughly 1995 and then 1988. In 1995 I was graduating from college and spent a bit of time jobless and untethered, traveling with my sister to Colorado and abroad, a stack of Image titles in tow so I could play catch-up on Gen 13, Backlash, Grifter and Wildcats (among others). Prior to that in 1988 I was a high school student about to graduate, and I was getting weekly shipments from Mile High Comics by mail order of about as many comics as I currently collect (albeit at better prices) thanks to some profitable publishing efforts and a family windfall that actually trickled down to me. I still remember the old 80's revival of Action Comics as a serial collection...loved that book; or the "vote for the Jason Todd Robin to die" event. For being a comic collector/reader those were good times.

Now, sitting as I am in my forties with a good career and decent income I appreciate that I can still even do this thing I like to do with collecting comics....but I have to wonder how anyone my age in 1988 (17 years old) or 1995 (24 and freshly graduated jobless ex-student) would have pulled this off. Buying 30 comics in 1988 cost about 75 cents an issue, so I'd spend $22.50 a month. In 1995 buying 30 comics a month at $1.50 a copy meant I had doubled my monthly cost for the same intake to $45/month. Now, in 2014, comics are typically $2.99 or $3.99 with a trend toward the $4 side (DC holds most of its titles at the $3 mark but if you pay a higher price you're usually getting a deluxe issue). For 30 comics that's roughly $105 a month assuming a median average of $3.50....bump it up if you like Marvel only.

$105 a month for comics? In 1988 I could afford to pay for 30 comics a month on the money I made working for my folks or publishing cheap games and fanzines. In 1995 I was largely destitute for a while and still managed to scrape together the money once I found even a low wage position. Today? I can do it on my income, but if I made what I did even just three years ago I wouldn't even be buying comics as an unnecessary expense with a low "fun time:cost" ratio.

Now, that said....comics today have better graphics and usually better art than ever before. Paper quality is superior, coloring is digital and state of the art. Writing is often better, or at least it's taken an uptick from a trend I saw in the late nineties which I call the "Liefield Effect" in which you can take two pages of actual story and make it last for 22 pages. But....it looks like comics today are trending away from that (to be replaced by different bad story habits....but I'll save that gripe for another column!

Juggling Continuity - or how Disney got me interested in Star Wars novels again

Like many beloved continuities the Star Wars Expanded Universe grew over a period of thirty years in a manner typical of a complicated invasive pest organism let loose into an unprepared wilderness. Like tumbleweeds in the American Southwest, rabbits in Australia or the nutria in Louisiana the Star Wars Expanded Universe has run rampant though the unexplored off-screen potential universe of Star Wars. For better or worse this has led to some memorable stories that people love (anything by Timothy Zahn) and some horrible stuff that we all wish we could forget (list too long to name; also, contentious as everyone has their pet peeves). It's also led to an interesting and weighty nightmare in terms of just how a reader keeps up with all of this. Take a break from Star Wars novels for a year or two and you could find yourself hopelessly out of touch, unable to catch up and figure out what the heck happened.

Juggling continuity like this is a real beast of an issue, and some IPs have managed this better than others. Comic book publishers are especially famous for this: DC Comics, for example, periodically likes to reboot its universe and uses its many alternate realities to do so, a tradition going back to the Crisis on Infinite Earths which was ironically designed to clean up their many alternate-reality crossover storylines that had turned their comic continuity into spaghetti mush. This has the advantage of making it easier to jump into a contemporary storyline for DC (with the New 52 reboot most recently) but with the disadvantage being that older graphic novels and comics may be contradictory or nonsensical in relation to the newer tales.

Marvel, by contrast, dogmatically sticks to their core universe and periodically "soft reboots" with retellings and reimaginings of the classics stories of yore (for example, the Season One graphic novels) that are designed to make the original tales (many dating to the sixties with all the baggage that entails) more contemporary while not precisely negating the original tales. As a result, you have to read all Marvel comics with the implicit assumption that everything that has ever been published for the series technically takes place within the last 10-15 years of their condensed "super-floaty timeline." That means that in the early eighties when I was reading about the first Phoenix tale, in "Marvel-universe-time" those stories technically took place around 2000-2004 in "current Marvel-universe-time." And in ten years those stories will be taking place ten years later.

In Marvel's defense, they do seem to be progressing their universe, ever so slightly. It just so happens that their batch of younger protagonists, the second and third generation after the originals, tend to be really uninteresting. Marvel's focus on a sort of "quasi realism" in terms of these character arcs and the whole super heroes in suits concept puts brand recognition for the younger characters at odds with the more readily identifiable characters.

Marvel also has a problem with characters tied to specific time periods: the further the timeline "ages" the weirder the stories and justifications for these characters get. Magneto, as an example, should be 79 years old roughly by my estimates. He looks it in the movies, but I suspect in the comics he's had some sort of slowed aging going on....something? Who knows.

But back to continuity and Star Wars. The idea that the Expanded Universe would survive Episodes VII-IX is silly; there's no way that the people working on the films would slavishly adhere to the bizarre complex canon that grew up in the Expanded Universe, and in fact by not doing so they have opened up the Star Wars universe to a new reinterpretation, one which does not reflect the many years of various special projects, games, novel events (NJO) and other detritus that turned into the Expaned Universe.

For people like me this is a great thing: I get to jump back in to Star Wars feet first when they start releasing the "new canon" novels being scheduled for release. This is going to be great, especially if you (like me) often found the old EU novels to be strange ducks, a product which was one part fan service, one part "we don't know what we can/can't write about in relation to the prequels" and especially the weird anachronism that is the unaging characters of Luke, Han Leia and the rest whose real-life actors carried on in the real world while their on-screen doppelgangers at best got a slight dusting of gray around the temples on their book covers to symbolize the decades spinning away.

I don't know if ditching the whole canon like this is a good move for the cavalcade of Star Wars die hard fans out there, but for me it's just the incentive I need to actually think about getting back into the core Star Wars universe. I really look forward to reading some novels free of the baggage that the EU brings with it everywhere it goes.

Unfettered! On Comics, and Other Stuff

Free to write whatever I feel like for the first time in three months --following February's Savage Worlds in Space Daily, March's 13 Days of 13th Age and April's 30 days of B/X D&D....gah!-- I now have may resume writing whatever springs to mind at any given moment, including boring blog posts where I talk about not much at all.

Hidden behind the focused run for three months has been my secret "actual focus" going on in real life: comics. Lots and lots of comics. My years-long drought of staying away from the medium of comics is at an end, and thoroughly staked through the heart now. I have hoarded so many graphic novels, so many series both current and past that I accidentally booked my comic reading for the next couple of years, I think.

Hoarding is a problem that runs in my family. I like to think my manifestion of it is more benign, albeit expensive at times.

Given that I'm now subbing (via the local Comics Warehouse) to around 20 or so titles (maybe more) on top of the heaping mounds of graphic novels I have acquired, I think I have more than enough to sustain me through to the point at which I snap and get tired of it all again. Assuming I reach that point...I actually love comics as a medium, but the price point over the years reached a critically dangerous "dollars to fun" ratio that regular novels, RPGs and video games seriously outstripped. Now, thanks to the generous price point of many graphic novels (DC's pricing is very nice for its New 52 books) as well as judicious use of Ebay and Amazon it is once again possible to buy TPBs without feeling guilty, or like I should be shoveling all this money into my retirement. Even though I probably should.

So it is with all this discussion that I am implying, but not announcing, that I may be talking a lot about what's going on in comics these days. It may not all be current.....I am really enjoying catching up on the complete Brian Michael Bendis run of New Avengers, for example (acquired the New Avengers Omnibus I for about $35 on Ebay....over 1,000 pages in the damned thing!) but it's quickly becoming apparent to me that Marvel really owes Bendis for making them so great. Hope he's well paid, he deserves it!

Likewise I am neck-deep in the New 52 now, and am reaching a saturation point with DC, enough so that the visceral thrill of getting back into the swing of reading comics is now being replaced by a scrutinizing, critical eye on certain books, especially ones that someone thoughtlessly turned over to Rob Liefield, a guy who seems to be very good at damaging the IPs entrusted to his care; the travesty he made out of Grifter and Deathstroke....seriously, there's some bad writing going on in these books. Just painful stuff. I could only hope the Wildstorm characters were popular enough to get a Flashpoint/Crisis style retcon, or maybe a reboot in their own universe again....the way they were subsumed into the DC continuum with the New 52 is endlessly painful; only Voodoo's two book run really did something to make the character better than it had been. And there's no good excuse for Deathstroke, DC's quasi-Punisher type, who was getting better, more coherent stories and presentation thirty years ago in the Teen Titans as a proper villain.

Anyway....more to come, just enjoying a chance to write a blog without a chosen theme for once!

Review: Team 7

Team 7 (issues 0 through 8)

When Team 7 (and it's sister title Team 6) came out as a set of miniseries during Wildstorm's "Still Part of Image" heyday (such as it was), it served as a sort of bridge between several characters and series, tying in a number of the more venerable characters in the old Wildstorm universe together, via a rather complicated backstory set during the Cold War and later. The Grifter, Lynch, Backlash and others were all part of this Vietnam Era team on which various experiments (a throwback to MK-ULTRA and such) led to a curious mix of war heroes with psychic abilities. The team survives a variety of harrowing encounters before splitting to the "present" of the nineties at the time, and to their own titles and future lives as costumed vigilantes.

Team 7 drags a metric ton of Wildstorm and DC characters into a potpourri in similar fashion, with Cole Cash (Grifter) rubbing shoulders with Lynch again (albeit for the first time in the New 52), along with a younger Deathstroke, a younger and thinner Amanda Waller (formerly of Suicide Squad last I checked), a younger Dinah Drake (alias the Black Canary) and more.....even Steve Trevor of Wonder Woman fame appears at one point (pretty sure its the same guy...he's a pilot and all that). This bizarre mixture of characters comprises an ongoing eight issue medley of madness in which the Wildstorm universe is mashed into the DC continuum.

Arguably some of this shift is necessary; there are plenty of DC characters that have backgrounds that fit the Team 7 dynamic well, and the book demonstrates this handily. Likewise, some of the old Team 6 and Team 7 characters are simply no longer with Wildstorm...some were properties of Top Cow and other Image Comics publishers; such is the hazard of the great and sort of failed Image experiment.

Anyway, Team 7 takes the potentially great premise (the secret history of various heroes in a sort of spec ops quasi-military outfit, filling out the backstory that helps explain the present) and manages to weave some great stories even as it makes mince meat out of certain characters....including characters many of us might have liked to see reimagined in the actual New 52 universe.

A few spoilers ahead: Caitlin Fairchild appears and is apparently assimilated borg-style by a rogue Spartan who actually appears to be a creation (?) of Gammorah's evil mastermind Kaizen. This same event leads to the creation and destruction (?) of Ladytron, who gets enough screen time to look vaguely like who she's supposed to be before either disappearing or dying. It's not that these characters are absolutely dead and gone....they could be....but this book left a lot of cliffhangers and "no explanations" to questions I can only assume may be answered elsewhere. Maybe I just have more reading to do. Still....this is not how I would have written Caitlin Fairchild (from Gen-13) or Ladytron into the DC universe.

In the end the plot and pacing gets really wacky as the tale progresses. At times I felt like the writer for this book was at best mildly familiar with many of the characters, and it was rather unsatisfying to see Lynch brought in (as an example) to found the team, yet his presence is all but eliminated before the book concludes...despite some hints that he's still around and alive. Foreshadowing? Maybe, but it felt more like "rushed, and couldn't wrap up the intended script," to me. I head this book may already be winding down....this could either be the reason for the feeling of rushed plots or a cause of such.

Anyway, if you're a fan of the old Wildstorm/Image era of Team 6 and Team 7 then this is going to be a pale shadow of what once was. If you're a DC fan who is not too familiar with the Team 7 notion, then you may find this book a lot more enjoyable as your stake in the Wildstorm characters abused here is not going to be as problematic.Indeed, the DC characters tend to shine, being placed in the more visceral environment of a Wildstorm-flavored plot, and when characters like Eclipso appear it's got a real nasty, interesting vibe to the whole tale.

I still can't believe that they brought in Spartan as some sort of Gammoran robot and Majestic as some sort of byproduct of being assimilated by said robot (it's becoming painfully clear that the Kherubim did not survive the transition to the New 52 universe). That entire plot was.....so poorly executed.....it's just beyond words how disappointed I am in this series' run through issue 8 so far.

Diving Back into Comics...Justice League Dark, Voodoo and Pathfinder

I've been in a funk lately....video games have been unfulfilling (usually), MMORPGs feel like stale toast to me these days, my focus on RPGs has narrowed down to Pathfinder for now as I find I only have time to focus on it for my Wednesday game and (occasionally) the DDN playtests. On the other hand some fiction I've discovered has been very engaging...I've especially enjoyed Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim novels and Tim Curran's awesome writing (especially Zombie Pulp, a fantastic collection of short fiction that reignited my inerest in both short stories and zombie fiction). Both are excellent reads if you're in the mood for some grizzly, down-to-earth weird horror and modern supernaturalism.

One thing I used to be into which fell to the wayside was comic books. Among my old favorites were Planetary, the Wildstorm universe books (Grifter, Wildcats, Stormwatch, Backlash, Team 6, etc.) and the unbeatable Top 10. Eventually Wildstorm sort of fell apart, and its inconsistent revival through DC made following it tough. Other greats (like Planetary) died due to the whim of the creator, though one can't fault a writer for deciding to end it when the creative drive for the project stopped.

For myself, another big part of the exodus was due to the difficulty of re-entry to the more mainstream comics. Comics are rather expensive by the issue, and the big publishers have a habit of marketing them in ways which make it difficult to get a coherent story if you aren't following every single storyline. I'm a victim of the era of the Blackest Day/Brightest Night (or whatever) era of comics....and effectively dropped out about a year before the New 52 hit. Marvel's even worse in my book....trying to keep track of it all was painful, and some of their writers need to be dragged out back and taught a lesson or two in good storytelling. The Ultimate series was good....until it, too, got overly convoluted and then who knows what they did with it, because staring at the comic shop walls? I can't tell anymore what the hell is going on with Marvel. Easier to stick with the movies, I say.

In the end, the only series I continued collecting were the Dark Horse Conan releases (which are quite good, actually).

Anyway, after a visit to the local Kaboom! comic shop I snagged volumes one and two of Voodoo, the first volume of Justice League Dark, and ordered Grifter and Suicide Squad. I also snagged the compendium of the Pathfinder comic series and put in some orders for the Conan graphic novels my collection is still missing.

I'm kind of excited to be getting back into comics, I like how DC is methodically printing these series in 6-issue compilations at a time, and I think it's just the "spark" I need to help me get some creative energy back.

I'll offer up some belated opinions and reviews soon...