SPOILER SPACE

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The Acolyte is a television show in the Star Wars universe, set 100 years before The Phantom Menace. It was created by Leslye Headland (co-creator of Russian Doll), who described it as ‘Frozen meets Kill Bill’, which is an excellent pitch for a new show. It received mixed reviews and was cancelled after a season because of low viewership and issues with the budget.

I should say upfront that I am not going to specifically review the show; that’s not the point of this blog post. It will be more a rambling braindump of my feelings about what Star Wars is about to me, precipitated by viewing The Acolyte.

I also want to state that I’m a fan of Star Wars, so I was eager for additional live-action entertainment set within the universe, especially a show set near the end of the High Republic with the Jedi in abundance and at the height of their powers; I also like the idea of a show that is not about the Skywalker saga. I neither liked nor disliked The Acolyte – there is some good stuff and some stuff that I didn’t agree with – but I was still disappointed that it was cancelled.

The show started badly for me by killing Carrie-Anne Moss fairly promptly – I understand that this is a great piece of bait-and-switch: everyone is pumped that Trinity is a Jedi, top billing in the show, then pulling the rug from under the viewers’ feet (apologies for mixing my metaphors) as a way to grab attention. However, even with a woman as the creator and showrunner, I’m never going to enjoy the murder of a woman as the initiating event for a story, sorry.

The show wanted to demonstrate that likeable characters are not safe – the slaughter in episode 5 of the Jedi we had come to know (particularly Dafne Keen’s Jecki Lon) is particularly brutal – and that this was not your usual Star Wars, which to me was one of the problems.

One of the aspects of the show is the idea that the Jedi are not infallible, with decisions made by them to cover up events having consequences later down the line. This is an interesting idea, although I think it misses the point of Star Wars.

Star Wars is essentially about the good guys beating the bad guys – it’s supposed to be a story in which heroes win the day against clear-cut villains, in the tradition of classic myths and legends, as per George Lucas’ following of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. The Empire is bad and needs to be destroyed; the Rebels are doing the right thing against overwhelming odds.

(The prequels missed the point as well because the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader is really not that interesting – the enjoyable aspects of that trilogy were seeing Jedi and their power, as well as other corners of the Star Wars universe. The Rings of Power has this problem as well – seeing Hitler, I mean Sauron coming to power isn’t interesting because we know he does, which is why the story is about the heroes beating him; William Goldman’s maxim, “You always come into the scene at the last possible moment” is ignored when it comes to prequels.)

The essence is therefore watching an entertaining story in which good prevails in a simple morality tale that is supposed to inspire (or, to use the paraphrasing of GK Chesterton, “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”). That is certainly what I want from a Star Wars story; there can be nuances and shades of grey, but some old-fashioned ‘good-beats-bad’ entertainment. Which is not what The Acolyte did, nor did it set out to achieve that.

In the same way, Andor is not what I look for in a Star Wars story. Andor is extremely well told, with rich characterisation and a multi-layered narrative, but I find it hard to see it as a Star Wars story. It is a hard sci-fi story about the bureaucracy of an evil empire and the beginnings of the rebellion against it, which just happens to be set in the Star Wars universe. (As a wag on social media put it, someone thought, “You know the rebel who found the Death Star blueprints? I wonder what the person was like who was trying to find him, and what was his relationship with his mother?”) Andor would have been a tough sell if it didn’t have the years of world-building that Star Wars has.

The other aspect of The Acolyte which I didn’t enjoy is that it is a show about the start of the Sith, another aspect in which I have absolutely no interest. I enjoyed a swole Manny Jacinto as the Stranger – it was clear as soon as I saw him onscreen that he was the Sith master to Mae’s apprentice – but I don’t want to watch the development of the bad guys as my source of entertainment. The real world in which we live now is showing us the actual rise of fascism in the USA and parts of Europe – I want to escape this unfortunate reality in my television viewing, not see a dramatisation of it but with lightsabres.

I realise that this simplistic view is perhaps at odds with the current desire for more complex and darker storytelling, but I have strong sense of wrong and right (did reading comic books instil this or was I attracted to superhero comic books because of their strong sense of right and wrong? Discuss) and that directly affects my choices of audiovisual entertainment. The Acolyte didn’t work for me because it wasn’t a Star Wars story; it was a story about the consequences of the flawed actions of people with noble intentions but a blinkered view (more or less). Which is fine, if that’s what you want from a Star Wars story; I didn’t, but at least it did something new with franchise. We’ll see what they try next …

The post What I Want From Star Wars (aka Thoughts on The Acolyte) appeared first on Clandestine Critic.

As a fan of comic books who grew up with the only avenue for reading them was to buy them (graphic novels were not in the library then, and we didn’t have apps where we could access thousands of comic books whenever we wanted), I enjoyed visiting comic book shops in different locations whenever I had the opportunity. These specialised havens to my beloved comic books always provided that wonderful thrill: the smell, the wall of new comic books, the back issue bins that could provide hours of entertainment just rifling through them.

As a comic book blogger, I would also document these visits – see the ‘comic book shops’ category for my notes on various places I’ve visited and used during my lifetime, located in London, Canterbury, Bristol. For me, it’s a lovely record of these wonderful places, especially when unfortunately quite a few are no longer in operation.

I try to keep those posts updated – I’ll include a note to indicate when a particular shop is no longer in business, because I have a need to be accurate and complete in my archive, even though people don’t really use this blog as a resource for comic book shops in that way. (Although, it has been a delight that some of these posts have seen commenters leave memories of the places I’ve discussed, some even having discussions outside of responding to me.)

This need to keep track of all these shops has led to this post, which is effectively an update post but is also a new post. Back in 2008, I wrote about They Walk Among Us, a comic book shop in Richmond, which to me was notable as the business used as a comic shop in the sitcom Spaced (although not the specific location I visited, having subsequently moved from the placed used in filming). It closed in 2009, taken over by Ace Comics, but then taken over by Raygun. I hadn’t visited Richmond in the intervening years, so I thought I’d visit it to cross the ‘t’s and dot the ‘i’s in the comic book shop category. Yes, I know I have a problem.

If you compare the photo of Raygun above and the photo of They Walk Among Us in my previous post, you can see that it’s exactly the same shopfront apart from a paint job – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I guess. It’s pretty similar inside, although there is a difference: Raygun is primarily focused on comic books, whereas They Walk Among Us had a heavy focus on geek-related merchandise, as well as some comic books.

I was happy to see that Raygun has lots of comic books: new comic books on a main wall; many shelves of trade paperbacks from the usual suspects of Marvel, DC Comics Dark Horse and Image; plenty of manga on another wall; and plenty of old comic books in boxes in the middle. (I find it particularly weird to peruse the back issue bins nowadays – I keep seeing comic books that I bought as they came out, now with a price tag of several pounds more than I purchased them for back then.) There is also some merchandise, but it is in no way a major aspect of the shop, so three cheers for Raygun’s dedication to comic books.

The location of the shop is still a place that I find curious – yes, Richmond is a great place to have a comic book shop because it gets a lot of footfall (it was already a popular destination because of the river and the park, but it feels that Ted Lasso has made it even more popular), but the route from the tube/train station to the park/main shopping road/Ted Lasso area doesn’t go past the shop unless you take a different road to get there. It must be doing OK because it is still in business 15 years later, so I shouldn’t overthink it, but it’s something I found odd so had to mention it.

It was lovely to visit Raygun, a delightful comic book shop in a delightful area, and I hope that I don’t have to add a footnote at some point in the future to document an unfortunate turn of events. If you love comic books and are in Richmond, you should definitely visit Raygun.

The post Comic Book Shop: Raygun appeared first on Clandestine Critic.

The Golden Age of hip-hop has strong parallels with the early days of the Marvel comic book universe.

Here I present the evidence for my hypothesis.

1. Both are primarily based in New York

Of the many aspects that made Marvel Comics so refreshing, one was that it existed in ‘the world outside your window’, i.e. in real-world locations (compared with the fictional cities used in the DC Comics universe), primarily New York and, more specifically, Manhattan (the X-Men were in Westchester, some 30 miles away, although this didn’t prove too much of an obstacle). Perhaps it was a little lazy having the adventures occur in the same place where the comic book creators worked, but it made for a cohesive, connected world.

Similarly, early hip-hop was based in New York – hip-hop was born in Harlem, NY, and many of the early pioneers were from various locations in New York, such as Queens (Run-DMC), Staten Island (Eric B. & Rakim), Brooklyn (Big Daddy Kane), Long Island (De La Soul). Obviously, this would change with the development of rappers from other cities in the USA, much as the world of Marvel Comics expanded outside the island of Manhattan – I’m not saying that the West Coast Avengers and the rise of the west coast rappers is the same – but the beginnings both hailed from the city so good they named it twice.

2. Made-up names (and alternatives)

Fantastical names are not the sole dominion on Marvel Comics, but the increased use of fantastical nicknames in addition to the superhero alias seems more Marvel than DC Comics. Mister Fantastic (Stretch), the Incredible Hulk ( Jade Jaws, Ol’ Greenskin, the Jolly Green Goliath), the Human Torch (Matchstick), Spider-Man (Web-Head).

Similarly, the approach to names for the early rappers was to use colourful monikers, from LL Cool J to Ghostface Killah to the Fresh Prince to Big Daddy Kane. In addition to these, there were the extra names that rappers used: Q-Tip referring to himself as The Abstract; Posdnuos (Plug 1) and Trugoy the Dove (Plug Two); Method Man has so many it’s ridiculous (Johnny Blaze, Iron Lung, Meth, Mr. M.e.f., Hott Nikkels, Shotgun).

3. Crossovers

One of the other great aspects of the Marvel Comic universe was the casual interactions between characters in each other’s books, with Spider-Man appearing in the Fantastic Four or Doctor Strange showing up whenever magic was needed or Daredevil or She-Hulk appearing whenever a lawyer was needed. This provided a wonderful cohesiveness to the enterprise, connecting these different people and teams in an organic and fun way.

The early hip-hop groups did the same – rappers would outright mention other rappers (I’m not talking about the diss tracks), sometimes exhaustingly so: I’m sure some tracks would be 25% shorter if there weren’t so many call-outs and ‘This goes out to’ given to various rappers. There would be actual crossovers: the Native Tongue collective of A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, The Jungle Brothers and Queen Latifah/Monie Love to a degree would show up on each other’s tracks, or come together on a specific single such as ‘Buddy’. Then you might have a large team-up, such as the song Flava In Your Ear, which included LL Cool J, Notorious B.I.G. and Busta Rhymes. Both paint the same picture of everybody in the same field (Marvel comics or hip-hop) knowing each other and doing stuff together.

4. Fans would speculate on who was best

Marvel fans would constantly argue over who would win in a fight between the Hulk and the Thing. Hip-hop fans would argue over who was the best rapper (the earliest heated discussion I recall in hip-hop was Rakim versus Big Daddy Kane). Both sets of fans for each character/rapper would argue for and against, passionately and sometimes just angrily, weighing in on the pros and cons, speculating without and without evidence. The fact that it doesn’t matter, as long as we got good comic books/hip-hop tracks, didn’t seem have much sway – the arguing about it was the fun part.

5. Unfavourable treatment of women

Hip-hop does not have a good history when it comes to its treatment of women in its music (this can be applied to pop music generally, but I don’t think there’s been an academic paper on it as is the case for hip-hop). As I said, it’s one of the reasons I fell out of love with hip-hop because of the constant demeaning and degrading treatment of women in rap.

Marvel Comics isn’t as misogynistic, but Stan Lee was not good with women in the early days, treating the likes of Sue Storm, Janet Van Dyne and Jean Grey as as less than equals of their colleagues (which was unfortunately indicative of the times, perhaps, but still). Thankfully, there has been a lot of work in the books subsequently to rectify those early years, but it can be a struggle to read some of the early books if you are used to the idea of women as equal to men. However, hip-hop has a long way to go, unfortunately.

6. Time capsules

Comic books, by the nature of their non-stop monthly publication schedule, are very much of their time – in a good way. The quick turnaround time means that comic books can respond to current culture in an exciting way almost immediately, far better than other fictional responses (books, television, film). The only downside is that it means they can become dated – some of the language in particular, but also the historical and pop culture references (Mark Millar is especially guilty of dated pop culture references, but that’s a complaint for another time …).

When it comes to hip-hop, there is the element of topicality because of the sheer amount of words used in a rhyme plus needing to refer to events/people/cultural touchstones for the sake of communicating fluently to the audience. It can be weird listening to them now, from cultural references that don’t mean the same, from the Arsenio Hall show, the popularity of Keith Sweat to female fans, even the bizarre references to money and Donald Trump; I mean, A Tribe Called Quest had a song called ‘Skypager’, for goodness sake. However, both are fascinating artefacts of their time, which adds an extra quality of its own.

I’m sure there are more comparisons, but I believe that I have presented sufficient evidence to support my hypothesis. You are, of course, free to disagree.

The post Correlations between Early Hip-Hop and Early Marvel Comics appeared first on Clandestine Critic.

As mentioned in the post talking about the RBdigital app, one of the most unfathomable aspects of reading digital comics legally in the UK is that DC Comics doesn’t offer any digital comics to our libraries. Marvel, Image, Dark Horse – thousands of comic books in the digital library offering of the City of London libraries, allowing people to get hooked on their content. DC Comics? Fuggedaboutit. Why do you hate the UK, DC Comics?

This country-specific hatred continued when DC Comics launched the DC Universe Infinite (DCUI) app, making it a USA-only business for well over a year (and other countries, to be fair, but that doesn’t feed into my narrative). As part of a large multinational corporation, DC Comics should have been able to launch worldwide from the start; to not do that was to throw money away and it demonstrated narrow thinking.

In another frustrating decision, DCUI was launched in the UK in May 2022, but just 6 months later was the launch of DC Universe Infinite Ultra, which increased the number of available comics (from 27,000 to 32,000, mostly Vertigo books that are not accessible on DC Universe Infinite) but mainly changed the time limit of when the comic books would arrive on the app: it’s 6 months after publication for DCUI but only 1 month after publication for DCUI Ultra. This obviously comes at a price (an annual subscription to DC Universe Infinite is £54.99 whereas the same for DC Universe Infinite Ultra is £87.99); this was too much for me, especially because I took advantage of the initial launch offer: buy an annual subscription in the first month it was launched and keep renewing it, you pay £36.99 until you stop the subscription. So, I miss the ability to read Vertigo comic books, but I’m not bothered about the 6-month delay, so it’s not a big deal, but why the wait to launch the extra version? Why not have both options available from the start?

So, what about the app itself (which is the point of this post)? The app opens with the Netflix-style carousel of new books at the top, followed by a row of the books you are currently reading (under ‘Dive back in’). Beneath that is the row of Latest releases, the books that have come out on the app this week. Strangely, even though I am only on DC Universe Infinite, the next row of books is the Ultra latest releases – I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a constant reminder of what you’re missing and thus nudging you to upgrade, but it’s annoying, plus it’s strange because the book covers are blacked out with a lock icon on the top to say, ‘YOU CANNOT READ THIS BOOK, YOU CHEAP SCUM!’. Under that are the DC Go! Books, comics in the dynamic vertical-scrolling experience for mobile devices. Beneath these rows, the selection changes: as I write this, it’s Creature Commandos because of the recent cartoon, then DC All In books, New Gods storylines, Harley Quinn-related books – just a variety of different options being pushed differently depending on what’s going on in the world.

If you click on a book, you go to another page that has a button to start reading the book; there are also buttons to bookmark as a favourite (the heart), add it to a list (the plus button), a download button for offline reading, and a sharing button. Underneath, it provides a brief summary of the book, the main creators (hyperlinked to search results for the creators), plus a row showing the rest of the books in the series in sequential order, so you can keep track. The reading experience is the same as all other comics-reading apps – smooth page transitions, the ability to read panel-by-panel, the ability to select different pages via a menu – nothing unusual and it does the job well, which it should be.

So time to discuss the negative. The app is the buggiest of all the reading apps. I have encountered the ‘Oops’ page way more than any of the others, even if it’s a cute animation-style Alfred Pennyworth. This isn’t just when I was using an older Android device that wasn’t the latest operating system – it’s also on my current tablet, which is up to date. The worst bug was pages that were nearly almost completely grey – the very top few millimetres show the comic book page, but not the rest (you can see that the pages exist when you use the menu to see the page selection option). These things shouldn’t be occurring on an app that I am paying for.

[To be fair: I contacted Customer Services, who were quick to respond; they suggested switching off VPN/privacy apps, neither of which I use, then came back with uninstalling the app, shutting down the tablet, turning it back on then reinstalling the app. This worked, but it’s an extremely aggressive solution to something that should not occur and has never occurred with any of the other comic book reading apps.]

The search option is another frustration. We have been spoiled by online searches perhaps, but it’s peculiar the results that show up. The results page starts with a row of storylines (collections of comic book stories that are somehow related to your search terms), then individual comic books (you have to click ‘See more’ to show all the results), the a row of Comic series, a listing of book series, be it a run on a main character or a mini-series. Getting the results you want can be a challenge.

For example, I was searching The Ray, specifically the Priest run from the mid-1990s – I’m missing a few issues, so wanted to read them. (It’s not a great series; it was only because it was early Priest stuff during my ‘collecting creator’s works’ period.) The ‘Storylines’ results row displayed Hitman: A Rage in Arkham, Batman/The Flash: The Button, The Nice House on the Lake, among others. The row of ‘Comic books’ results starts with The Legend of Wonder Women from 2015. The ‘Comic series’ row showed Gotham by Midnight, Ragman, Robin: Son of Batman, Trinity of Sin: Pandora – The Ray series I wanted was the tenth result in the list.

Another issue with the search is that it returns all books, no matter what subscription you have, but it’s only when you click through that you discover it’s an Ultra-only book that you can’t access – surely that should be more obvious on the search results? It’s similar on the ‘Comics’ tab, which is a huge list of all the books available on the app (well, not completely: there are some entries that include ‘0 items’ as the number of books available – WTF?), but there is no indication if you can actually read the book or not until you click through to the actual book itself. C’mon, DC Comics …

The user experience is frustrating in other areas. Instead of Marvel’s tick with ‘Read’ to indicate if you’ve read a book, the DCUI app uses a blue line at the bottom of the cover of the book. However, this blue line somehow ends up on books you haven’t read, particularly in the row of ‘Latest releases’, which seems amateur. In the ‘Dive back in’ row at the top, it has a list of the next book in the series, even if it’s only available on Ultra. The most annoying bug is the inexplicable switch to the next comic book on from the one you just read – I would finish an issue of a series, set up the next issue to read later. When I open the app later, the first book on the ‘Dive back in’ row would be the issue after the one I hadn’t read. This isn’t a one-off – it has happened many times, to the point of me having to double-check each series before continuing to read the series.

The ability to mark books for reading later on is good; however, to access this list, you have to click ‘My DC’ on the bottom of the app, which takes forever to actually load (well, more than 10 seconds, which feels forever on a device nowadays). I don’t mean to complain so much, but the experience is significantly worse than the Marvel app – I don’t see why this should be.

Despite this, it’s still enjoyable to be able to read comic books from DC’s vast library that I wouldn’t be able to access otherwise – all those original books (Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #27, Showcase #4) plus all those odd books and anthology titles with creators you admire but you wouldn’t necessarily buy (e.g. I read DC’s Crimes of Passion #1 from 2020, with some John Paul Leon art). I have also read some great books that I couldn’t have read otherwise (Taylor and Redondo’s Nightwing, King and Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, Taylor and Putri’s Dark Knights of Steel, Waid and Mora’s Batman/Superman: World’s Finest, King and Gerads’ Strange Adventures, King and Smallwood’s The Human Target – I would list more but the section of My DC that lists my Comic History has no more than 20 comic books in total, despite having a subscription for nearly 3 years and an average of reading at least a few comics every day during that time; damn it, I was trying to be positive about the app …).

In summary: the DCUI app is the only way I can actually get to read DC Comics in the UK (short of, you know, buying them), so I shall put up with the (many) irritations for the time being.

The post Notes on the DC Universe Infinite app appeared first on Clandestine Critic.

Is it an addiction? A fool’s paradise? FOMO? Nostalgia? OCD?

It’s been nearly 2 years since I last posted on this blog. Why am I returning?

Good question. I wish I had a good answer.

Even though nobody reads this blog, I love having it as a public-facing record of my interests and history. I still pay for the domain name and hosting, so it must still mean something to me, even if I haven’t written anything in a long time. I miss having an evolving document of what I read, what I liked, what I watched, what intrigued me. It’s not a perfect record, by any means – I search through the site and am surprised when I find I haven’t written about a particular book or film or show, as if this blog was the only way of confirming it. So coming back to it is a way of trying to maintain that.

Part of it is the love for comic book blogs as a concept – I was on the periphery of the golden age of comic book blogging back in the late 2000s, but it was a delight to be part of this global network of people who loved sharing their opinions and feelings about comic books and related geeky things that existed on the fringes of society (before the geeks took over the world and everything became a comic book franchise). I didn’t know many people who liked comic books growing up – there was one bloke at school who was a big 2000 AD fan who introduced me to the comic book shop Forbidden Planet, but that was about it. Finding my tribe online was therefore a revelation, and it was wonderful to see these discussions happening on people’s posts and in the comments (remember when commenting was the Twitter of its day?) and swim in that comic book love. Returning to blogging about comic books is a way to remember that feeling.

People still blog about comic books – my favourite regular poster is Mike Sterling on Progressive Ruin: it’s a delight to read his thoughts on running a comic book shop and his interactions with people and the world of comics. His recent collection of posts about Wolverine comics that still sell just for the covers was both fascinating and amusing as I read it and thought, ‘I’ve got that one, and that one, and, ooh, that one’.

Blogging is deliciously old school and uncool now – the enforced pivot to video meaning that YouTube and TikTok content dominates the conversations that used to be the domain of blogs depressed me a little; I read much faster than people talk, so always found video to be too slow, despite the more frantic editing that is prevalent now. Posting to a blog seems a decidedly anachronistic move, but I never did this to be cool. Also, people don’t bother with their own websites now – if you were starting up today, you would probably start a Substack newsletter (which is still essentially a blog that is sent as a ‘newsletter’, with the archives acting exactly like blog archives) with the aim of monetising your content at some point. Leaving aside the negative aspects of using a service that hosts and makes money from letting Nazis use Substack, I don’t want to monetise this stuff (and nobody would pay for it anyway). So, blogging it shall be.

One of the main reasons I stopped blogging was because I was no longer part of the conversation – when the comic blogosphere started, a lot of it was talking about current comics, which I was still buying on a weekly (or almost weekly) basis and so could be part of the discourse. It has been a long time since I purchased individual comic books, for the simple reason of price (I know, I know – I’m the problem and part of why comic books are in the doldrums despite ruling the rest of the entertainment). I can’t justify the expense of individual issues, so I can’t write about books or even read about them for fear of spoilers.

I still devour vast amounts of comic books, just in other, completely legal ways. I continue to enjoy the fantastic City of London digital comic book library, with thousands of recent Image, Dark Horse and Marvel books, which are regularly updated with current books (just the other day, I read the collected edition of One Hand and the Six Fingers). I have a subscription to DC Universe Infinite (not Ultra), purely because DC Comics do not provide digital versions to any of the libraries I access, and because the price I pay is kept at the £36 per year I first paid when I started as soon as the service was available in the UK as part of an incentive deal to get subscribers. Sure, I miss out on Vertigo comics and have to wait 6 months from being published, but I refer you to the earlier section about no longer being part of the conversation. I dip into the Marvel Unlimited app every other year, mostly for being able to access the more obscure stuff that isn’t necessarily collected.

Talking of which, another aspect of trying this again is the thought of buying comic books because I can’t access them via the apps. Marvel Unlimited is unfortunately a misnomer, because of the complete absence of MAX books (so I can’t read the latest Garth Ennis Punisher or Nick Fury books) and other books they simply don’t have. In my case, the book I want to read that isn’t on the app is the New Universe’s Psi-Force from back in the day. I brought the issues when they first came out and had a lot of fondness for the Fabian Nicieza/Ron Lim issues that made up the second half of the series, but the Marvel app has only the first nine issues of the book and nothing else. Why? I’m not sure, but it has ignited an urge to visit a comic book mart and see if I can pick up those issues in the back issue bins, preferably at a good price (25p or 50p an issue), to correct my mistake of removing them from my collection when I moved countries a few decades back. I can’t remember the last time I had that feeling, so that must be a good thing, right?

Therefore, I have once again decided to try this blogging thing again, a pattern that has been repeated on an unfortunately regular basis (e.g. here, here, here). Let’s see how long it lasts this time …

The post Return of the Critic* (Yet Again) appeared first on Clandestine Critic.

The first point to mention that, although it’s remembered as the Fraction/Aja run, the art for the series was not exclusively by Aja. Other talented artists drew issues: Javier Pulido (#4 and #5 and Annual #1), Steve Lieber and Jesse Hamm (#7), Francesco Francavilla (#10 and #12), Chris Eliopoulos (#17) and Annie Wu (internal romance covers for #8 and the Kate Bishop solo story in #14, #16, #18, #20). This means that Aja actually drew only half the issues (approximately); however, his unifying covers, design work, general aesthetic and moody artwork set the tone and consistency for the book that defined the title, apart from being the artist who drew it more than the other artists. Also, there’s the fact that his art is amazing …

Before this post becomes a hagiography of Aja’s art (which it will), let’s start with some basics. This series came out in 2012, part of the Marvel Now reboot-but-not-a-reboot. It is very specifically about what Clint Barton aka Hawkeye does when he’s not in the Avengers as well as dealing with his various issues (his inability to accept help, his broken relationships, his not thinking things through). In this, he his helped by Kate Bishop aka Hawkeye, who arrives in issue #2 and gets to have her own adventure later in the series. The book as a whole is a wonderfully entertaining series, digging into Clint’s psyche, developing Kate, introducing ideas and characters that would be used wholesale for the Disney+ series (Lucky the Pizza Dog, the Tracksuit Bros, the car chase), mixing great action with character moments and hilarious dialogue.

The first issue starts as it means to go on, with Hawkeye falling out of a window while firing a grapple arrow with the caption: ‘Okay. This looks bad.’ We are shown that in his downtime, Clint lives in the top floor of a building in Bed-Stuy – Fraction has a lot of fun playing with the comic book form, such as background dialogue that is represented as ‘(Some Spanish-sounding stuff!)’ and ‘(Russian maybe?)’ – fully aware of his place in the world, describing himself as ‘fighting with a stick and a string from the Paleolithic era. Paleolithic. I looked it up.’ It’s also the introduction of Lucky the Pizza Dog, who helps Clint but gets hurt so Clint saves him. Fraction has a good handle on what he wants to do with the story, and Aja has a great handle on what he wants to do with the art to complement the story. He uses the technique of smaller panels within panels to highlight important parts of the scene, with beautiful panel design that uses the grid format but also plays with it as he leads you through the pages (he does have a Master’s degree in Fine Arts [Design and Audiovisuals] and it shows).

Aja’s talent for storytelling and design is throughout the book, from the covers to the interiors, and it’s a joy to the eyes. The second issue has a page that is a phone call between Clint and Kate, in which Clint asks her to work with him – it’s a masterclass in design and use of panels to tell the story, with each a different facial expression to convey the emotion of the scene, and with the panels as a waterfall between two larger panels to Clint and Kate at their respective phones. And that’s just a talking scene. In issue #3, we have the car chase scene (the Tracksuit Mafia chasing Clint and Kate in a car stolen by a woman that Clint has just slept with) that is a dazzling orchestration of action and camera placement. It’s also the issue in which we have the infamous panel of a naked Clint jumping across the panel, with a Hawkeye mask face covering his modesty:

It’s not just the Aja show – Fraction is an equal participant, setting up story beats that will pay off further down the line while giving you all the action you want and the funny lines (‘Putty arrow, bro!’, ‘(Derogatory patriarchal epithet)’, ‘I geev you Avenger (slang for male genitalia)’). The fourth and fifth issues highlight this due to Javier Pulido coming on board for art duties for a story about a missing videotape being auctioned to big villains in Madripoor that indicates Clint’s hero attitude but also sets up Madame Masque as a problem for Kate later in the series. Pulido is a talented artist who does a great job here, but Aja has put such a definitive stamp on the book that it’s hard to accept another interpretation.

An aside: the final three trade paperbacks order the issues differently to how they appeared originally: the second trade starts with issue 7, before issue #6, and then returning to the sequence until issue #11; the third trade compiles Kate’s story into a single story, the individual issues of which alternated with Clint’s story, which is compiled in the final trade, starting with issue #17, before jumping back to issues #13 and #15, and then finishing the book in sequence from #19. It’s an interesting use of the trade collection, which I can’t recall being used much before, allowing for a more seamless reading experience (from both a character perspective and art perspective).

Issue #7 is ostensibly about a big storm affecting our heroes, but which will have an impact later in the series – I wonder what this series must have been like to read in the single-issue format and the month-to-month wait between them. The trade returns to issue #6 and Aja’s superb graphic design, from the opening page with a mix of small panels and empty space, to the subsequent pages with a huge panel and lots of small panels underneath or around the large panel, with his art style taking on a ‘graphic design’ sensibility in coordination. Plus ‘It’s (obscene gerund) snowing’, which is my favourite of Fraction’s playing with word balloons.

The second trade deals with Clint’s relationships, with appearances from his ex-wife Bobbi, Natasha Romanoff and Jessica Drew (a more recent relationship, I presume, from my limited knowledge of the character’s history), and an issue drawn by Francavilla (which you can’t call a fill-in). But it’s issue #11 that blows everything away with the story told entirely from the point of view of Lucky the Pizza Dog, and it’s an absolute delight. From the opening page in which we see graphical representations of how Lucky views Clint and Kate, to the minimal use of dialogue and the maximum use of iconography (the splash page of Lucky sitting in front of the building and smelling everything is fabulous), the whole issue is genius, so hats off to Fraction and Aja even more than I’ve already removed my headwear in appreciation.

The second trade has extra material in the form of Matt Hollingworth explaining the colour process for the book, explaining that ‘Hawkeye is colored with minimalism in mind’, which highlights the collaborative approach to comic books that simpletons like me can sometimes forget.

The third trade, LA Women, has the annual (with Pulido on art) and the adventures of Kate (and Lucky, because he left with her instead of staying with Clint) when she leaves the self-destruction of Clint in New York and travels to Los Angeles (Clint: ‘Great idea. Because the West Coast totally needs a Hawkeye.’) and tries to make it on her own and her father cuts off her credit cards (because he is a bad guy in league with the villains, including Madame Masque, who wants revenge for the Madripoor incident in which Kate humiliated her).

The issues are basically a play on Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (Elliott Gould, who stars in the film as Philip Marlowe, even appears as the face of a character who starts out as what looks like a cameo to acknowledge the reference but then becomes an actual character in the story), as Kate tries to be a private investigator in LA, but is hamstrung by life getting in the way and interacting with people. Art on these issues is by Annie Wu, who is the perfect artist for Kate and brings a lovely style and vibe to the whole story – this is another excellent design choice (and presumably to give time for Aja to work on the other issues) because it distinguishes the story from the New York-based stories that a specifically focused on Clint while providing a more suitable palette for the issues. The jokes are obviously still there, because Fraction does good funny, such as Kate trying to distract people: ‘Holy crap, it’s Hercules, Iceman, Black Widow, Ghost Rider, and Angel? But why? It makes no sense!’.

The title of the final trade, Rio Bravo, describes the story as Clint tries to do the right thing defending the apartment building from the Tracksuit Mafia in a final showdown. But this is not before he watches an animated special in issue #17 (drawn by Eliopoulos), in which the central character is essentially a stand-in for Clint, or the Francavilla-drawn issue #12, which is about Barney Barton, Clint’s older brother and arch-enemy (is that a pun?). An aside: I had never heard of Barney Barton before this – this is not a surprise because I did not read the Avengers books growing up (as I talk about here) – but then again, I didn’t really know much about Clint before reading these books; I was there for the creative team.

This book starts interweaving story beats from different issues, showing the same scene from a different perspective, enhancing the richness of the narrative that Fraction created to examine the character of Clint Barton. He also highlights the concept of Clint being hard of hearing (with some great panels from Aja showing American Sign Language but not explaining what is being said), which is a great addition to the story. [EDIT: Fraction didn’t introduce the hard of hearing element to Clint’s history, as written before. Thanks to Nik in the comments.] Aja’s art also does a lot of heavy lifting – issue #13 sees all pages in the nine-panel grid to regulate the storytelling pace and to allow the movement back in time to the same scenes from different points of view, and the final two issues that show the battle of Bed-Stuy when the Tracksuit Mafia come to the block are excellent showcases for his action storytelling because there are many pages without any dialogue.

It was great to reread these books again and revisit why it is so beloved. It’s the combination of all great comic books: a great writer with a great story to tell and a point of view; an artist with a distinctive vision that serves and enhances the story, complemented by perfect colours. It also works wonderfully as a comic book in itself – the story (and design elements) can be used as the basis for a television show, but this specifically uses the medium of the comic book to tell the story; it is also about the comic-book character of Clint Barton, which is distinct from the MCU version of the character, something that enriches the tale and his place in the long history of the Avengers. If you haven’t read these books before, do yourself a favour and get hold of a copy and enjoy an excellent example of comic books within a shared universe.

The post Notes On A Comic Book: Hawkeye by Fraction and Aja appeared first on Clandestine Critic.

The Suicide Squad is technically a sequel to 2016’s Suicide Squad, but you don’t need to know anything about the first film to understand and enjoy the second film (apart from wanting to watch Margo Robbie’s wonderful performance as Harley Quinn for the first time). The David Ayer-directed Suicide Squad received a critical kicking – it’s not good but it’s not as awful as suggested, although I may be biased because I’m a big fan of the John Ostrander-written comic book series (who even gets a cameo in the film) – but it was a success (and introduced Robbie as Harley), so we should be thankful.

The original film was too grim-n-gritty, suffering from the Zack Snyder approach to the DC comic book movies, with lots of visual darkness and too much emphasis on the gritty. This sequel is nothing like that – this film occurs mostly in daylight, for a start, it doesn’t have to take the Snyder angle and doesn’t take itself too seriously – and writer/director James Gunn has produced the perfect comic-book-to-film adaptation of the tone of Ostrander’s original. It’s incredibly violent, incredibly sweary and incredibly funny – a perfect combination.

The success of the film is the ability to understand and capture the tone – it realises that the story is silly but it is not stupid; the film is able to use low-tier supervillains, splatter the screen with viscera and gore, yet provide all the many characters with moments and some depth, while finding time for jokes and even emotional beats. That’s quite a balancing act, but Gunn handles it all with dazzling aplomb – we should be grateful that some idiots went through his Twitter account to find some offensive tweets (for which Gunn had already apologised) that got Gunn fired from Guardians of the Galaxy 3 by Disney (only to be subsequently rehired) and allow him the time to make this film.

The set-up is familiar: Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) still runs Task Force X, which uses imprisoned supervillains for secret missions in exchange for time off their sentences. Here, she assembles a large team of old and new members: Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman), Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), Harley Quinn return, but now we have Bloodsport (Idris Elba), Peacemaker (John Cena), Savant (Michael Rooker), T.D.K. (Nathan Fillion), Blackguard (Pete Davidson), Mongal (Mayling Ng), Javelin (Flula Borg), Weasel (Sean Gunn), Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior), Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian) and King Shark (voiced by Sylvester Stallone). It’s a mission on the fictional island nation of Corto Maltese to infiltrate an old Nazi stronghold, so the team is split into two groups. And the first group is slaughtered in graphic fashion in the first few minutes of the film, all part of Waller’s plan and part of covering up secrets upon secrets, just in case you thought that some of the big names would reach the end of the film. It’s a bold opening gambit and sets the tone for the film.

The character interplay is what makes you care about the characters and find out what happens. The bickering between Bloodsport and Peacemaker (the ‘douchey Captain America’) over who is the best killer is a particular delight, Elba’s world-weariness in contrasts to Cena’s total commitment to the role of annoying blowhard with the silly toilet-seat helmet. Robbie steals the show as Harley Quinn again – her escape from the presidential palace is a highlight, as she shoots her way out and each kill is accompanied by an explosion of dayglo flowers – but the smaller roles also enrich the film. Melchior is a standout as someone who inherited the ability to control rats from her father (Taika Waititi in a flashback), but who bonds with the other members of the team. Dastmalchian is wonderfully odd as Polka-Dot Man with his seeming death wish and a bizarre obsession with his overbearing mother. Even Stallone’s voice work as King Shark is charming, despite the fact that the character keeps on eating people.

This film is James Gunn off the leash – it’s a visual extravaganza, with some brilliantly inventive camerawork and use of CGI, matched to a great soundtrack (as usual), with his outrageous sense of humour but also sincerity, allowed to make a film the way he wants to make it with material he cares for and knows how to achieve the best from all involved. It’s zany one minute, brutal the next, then emotional, and then you get a giant alien starfish walking through a city and controlling its inhabitants (what a world we live in where we have Starro as the threat in a DCEU film, and it wasn’t even in a Justice League film). This is ‘The Dirty Dozen but with supervillains’ that Gunn set out to make, with all dials turned up to 11 and embracing the absurd. It’s fantastically entertaining and I would be happy to see Gunn come back to make another Squad film (if he wasn’t already so busy).

Rating: DAVE

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As a member of several London libraries, I had to use RBdigital, the app of choice for most of the London libraries for ebooks. I wrote about using RBdigital, in which I talked predominantly about the selection of comic books on offer – I didn’t end up using RBdigital for reading comic books very much because, although more than 1500 collections of various comic books were available, the selection was rather poor. There were many collections aimed at children, a lot of franchise stuff, a relatively good selection of Marvel comics, albeit a few years behind the times, and absolutely no DC Comics whatsoever. Instead, I ended up using the app for magazines and ‘proper’ books.

Since that post, for reasons that I have been unable to discern, all London libraries switched over to the Libby app (part of Overdrive) to provide ebooks and audiobooks to their members, starting in March 2021, in a staggered approach across different libraries (I’m a member of six libraries from different London boroughs, so I was witness to the libraries introducing the app and the switchover during the course of several months). This post will be the corresponding overview of the Libby comic book offering as my post on RBdigital.

The Libby app is well-suited for reading comic books on your tablet – when you’ve selected something, it’s easy and quick to open it up and start reading, with smooth page transitions, the ability to bookmark, and an overall good reading experience. It wasn’t always that way – the Libby app was significantly different (and worse) when it first became the London libraries app, missing several features that were part of RBdigital that made the user experience much smoother. Fortunately, the people behind Libby have clearly been upgrading and listening to suggestions, which is good for all of us.

One feature that could still do with improvement is searching. We’ve been spoiled by Google (other search engines are available) when it comes to searching, so it’s frustrating that the Libby app search function isn’t as good as it can be. Part of it is the Search Suggestion feature, which lists the name of the book as a series, but then the book is not found in the actual results. How does that work? Surely having the title as a series indicates that it should be present in the catalogue? Why does it come up if it’s not there?

The other problem is that not everything has been catalogued correctly. For example, if you look up Donny Cates to see which books are in the library, it doesn’t return all volumes of Redneck because the fifth volume does not have an author listed; when doing a search, the Search Suggestion comes up with ‘Author’ next to the name (books come up with ‘Series’), so you think it would have them all correctly labelled. Not so: searching for Jonathan Hickman books does not return all East of West volumes because the author of vol 10 is ‘Collected’ (a regular occurrence, unfortunately).

Another irritating quirk is that if you close your tablet in the middle of reading a book, come back and finish the book and want to return it, the app tells you that you are not online so can’t complete the task, despite the fact that you could only read the book because you have internet. This happens with other things (search for a book then try to borrow it only to be told that you are offline, all evidence to the contrary). It’s only a niggle but it’s a confusing one.

The most interesting aspect and most important when it comes to reading comic books via Libby is the library card you use. The difference is startling, and it comes down to money (as so many things do).

My local library is part of The Libraries Consortium, which must have the most basic collection of comic books available, and I’d be fascinated to see how these deals are organised behind the scenes. Marvel books make up the bulk of the big publishers: 338 books in total (when searching for a title, the page for an individual book offers the option to search for other books by the same authors but also the same publishers). There is a wide selection as for RBdigital, a mix of old and new, although nothing more recent than approximately 5 years ago.

The real shocker is how few books are available from the other publishers. Image Comics has 38 books, which comprise 29 volumes of The Walking Dead, the first six volumes of Saga, Paper Girls vols 3 and 4, and for some reason Spawn vol 2 from 1992 (why?). Dark Horse Comics has 39 books, which are an even odder selection: some Minecraft, some Tomb Raider, four volumes of The Witcher, Avatar: The Promise, three volumes of Angel Catbird, 300, Sin City vol 1, five volumes of Roy Thomas’ Chronicles of Conan, two Dark Horse/DC collections, Murder Mysteries, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales, Spike: Into the Light, and the first two volumes of BPRD (but no Hellboy). These are not what I would call good representations of what these publishers have to offer.

And then there is DC Comics, a company that seems to hate the UK digitally when it comes to comic books: DC Universe Infinite is still unavailable in the UK, RBdigital had no DC comics, and the selection available in The Libraries Consortium is woeful. You can read 39 DC Comics books and 12 Vertigo books: Watchmen, all volumes of The Sandman, Death, V for Vendetta, Batman: The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, The Dark Knight Returns, Crisis on Infinite Earths – some big names for a decent start – but then the selection is erratic and doesn’t have anything published since 2013, mainly from the Nu DCU stuff. There are Batman vols 1 and 2 by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo, Action Comics vols 1 and 2 by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales, Superman vol 1 by George Pérez, Batman/Superman vols 1–3 by Greg Pak and Jae Lee, Batgirl vol 1 by Gail Simone, Wonder Woman vol 1 by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, Gotham Academy vols 1 and 2, Superman Unchained, Superman Earth One, Teen Titans vol 1, five volumes of Teen Titans Go!, the Before Watchmen collections, five volumes of Harley Quinn, plus Blackest Night, Batman: Knightfall vol 1, The Death of Superman and Batman: Hush.

This is insulting. I mean, I’m not asking for all their books to be in the library, but this is ridiculous – how are people going to get into the comic books if they don’t have the chance to read some stuff for free? Something published this decade? And such a limited range – it doesn’t make any sense.

To add insult to injury, it appears that The Libraries Consortium has only a single copy of each book available to loan. I’m not sure how these things work, but a digital copy of a book should be able to provide more than one copy to borrow. I point this out specifically because of the difference when I talk about using the Libby app with other libraries.

I am a member of libraries in the centre of London because the medical communications and healthcare advertising agencies I’ve worked for have been based there. Specifically, the City of London library and Lambeth libraries (although it appears that these two have the same deal in place for the digital collections), two places that have money, which means that all the comic books available have unlimited copies available. It’s been an absolute joy and the reason I haven’t written about Libby before is because I’ve been too busy reading collections.

The other wonderful thing is the collections themselves: more than 2,800 volumes of comic books/original graphic novels, which includes books published last year. EXCEPT FOR DC COMICS: there are no DC Comics books available at all – I like to think that the City and Lambeth libraries were insulted by the selection that DC offered to them and didn’t bother even with the paltry choice available, but that is wild speculation on my part. They more than make up for it with the other major publishers.

Dark Horse Comics gets off to a cracking start with 470 books; it’s not a perfect selection of their titles but it’s decent. Various omnibus editions of Hellboy, volumes of BPRD, Usagi Yojimbo Sagas, Umbrella Academy, a large selection of English-translation manga and their franchise stuff. They also include a selection of very interesting offerings: Heart in a Box by Kelly Thompson and Meredith McClarten, Steeple by John Allinson, Invisible Kingdom, LaGuardia by Nnedi Okorafor, the collected Dork (and strangely only the second volume of Blackwood, also by Evan Dorkin). It’s been a delight to be able to read these books.

Marvel Comics provide a whopping 944 books, another good selection of books across the board, representing their diverse offering, and including recent books that I read on Marvel Unlimited last year, such as some King in Black mini-series, US Agent by Priest, Power Pack by Ryan North, Marvel Snapshots by Kurt Busiek. I haven’t looked into the selection as much because I was using the Marvel Unlimited app until the end of last year, so I was able to read everything I wanted there, but I could see at a glance that it was a good selection. Interestingly, the publisher is named as ‘Marvel Worldwide, Inc.’, compared with ‘Marvel Comics’ on The Libraries Consortium.

However, the real delight is the selection for Image Comics: 1,275 books available (although, for some strange reason, 1,299 available at Lambeth libraries: City Library has Reckless: Destroy All Monsters, but Lambeth has all three Reckless books, which are as phenomenal as you’d expect from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips firing on all cylinders). So, in comparison, all volumes of Saga, Paper Girls, The Walking Dead, Invincible, but then a wonderfully diverse range of titles, including books from last year, such as Radiant Black vol 1, Time Before Time vol 1, Nocterra vol 1.

It’s not a perfect representation and some later volumes are missing, but it is very impressive, and I’ve had my desire for a diverse selection of interesting creator-owned comic books sated over the previous months: Farmhand, Redneck, Outer Darkness, Pulp, Assassin Nation, Airboy, Adventureman, Bitter Root, Prince of Cats, Sexcastle, Ghost Fleet omnibus, Sea of Stars, Lady Killer, Man-Eaters, Curse Words are some of the titles available and which have been consumed voraciously by me.

In summary: the Libby app is great for reading comic books, especially if you’re the member of a library with money, except if you want to read DC Comics books.

The post Reading Comic Books With The Libby Library App appeared first on Clandestine Critic.

As a fan of martial arts and superheroes, I was looking forward to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (herein referred to simply as Shang-Chi), although I suspect not as much as Asian people who are fans of the MCU. This film is the first Asian American superhero from Marvel, so it had a lot riding on it; fortunately, it lives up to the pressure to deliver an exciting origin story for the premier martial artist in the Marvel comic book universe (Iron Fist might have made it to the screen first, and I love the Matt Fraction/David Aja series, but Shang-Chi was published first).

The usual disclaimer about mentioning spoilers in this discussion, before further details.

Marvel Studios continues to retain its success rate in making entertaining origin stories for lesser-known characters from the comic books that introduce new characters, set up a new corner of the MCU while still ensuring that the film is part of the MCU with appearances from characters form other films. Shang-Chi is no exception. It starts with the villain: a millennia ago, Wenwu (Tony Leung) discovered the ten rings that grant him immortality and mystical powers, which he uses to conquer throughout history. This pauses in 1996, when he seeks to discover Ta Lo, a place rumoured to be home to mythical beasts, only to be stopped by its guardian, Ying Li (Fala Chen), in a beautiful fight that echoes Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Hero, in which Leung starred – this is the story of how they fell in love, as told by Li to her son, Shang-Chi (all done in voice-over in Mandarin, a wonderful statement of intent from the film). In the modern day, Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) is a valet at a hotel, using the name Shaun, with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina). On the bus home, he is attacked by men who want the pendant his mother gave him – Shang-Chi reveals he can more than take care of himself, beating the attackers (including Razorfist, who has a retractable blade instead of a right hand), but losing the pendant. He reveals he has a sister, Xialing (Meng’er Zhang), and has to find her in Macau – Katy accompanies him and he reveals how his father had him trained from the age of 7 years old in martial arts, until he was sent at 14 years old to kill the man who was responsible for the death of his mother. When they arrive, they discover that Xialing runs a successful fight club (which sees an appearance by Wong [Benedict Wong] and the Abomination) and still holds a grudge against her brother for leaving her when he escaped the family after going on the hit. The Ten Rings arrive – Wenwu sent the postcard that revealed Xialing’s location so he could get his children back and their pendants, which reveal the location of Ta Lo and the way in through the moving bamboo maze that protects it. Wenwu believes their mother is there, having heard her voice, and nothing will stop him from going there and destroying it to bring her back; it will be up to Shang-Chi, Katy, his sister and an unexpected party to get to Ta Lo first and stop Wenwu …

There’s a lot going on in the film, as the brief synopsis suggests, but director/co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton (Short Term 12) does a great job of keeping everything on track. There are great fight scenes, wonderful buddy comedy from Liu and Awkwafina, as well as tackling themes of grief, generational difference, identity, redemption, family. Quite an achievement. This is helped by a terrific cast: Liu is great as Shang-Chi – bad-ass but also charming and funny, the perfect combination for an MCU hero, and looks and acts the part: he’s not a martial artist but he has put in the work (as The Matrix showed, the actors have to look like they know what they’re doing in the fights); Awkwafina is funny as best friend Katy, getting most of the good lines and acting as the perfect foil; Leung is great, as usual – I’ve thought he was great since I first saw Hard Boiled back in the early 1990s and he’s got better since then; Michelle Yeoh (as Shang-Chi’s aunt in Ta Lo) is her usual excellent presence, but she doesn’t get enough to do; and then there is the unexpected appearance from Ben Kingsley as Trevor Slattery, who has been a sort of court jester for Wenwu since being broken out of jail for his performance as ‘the Mandarin’ (there’s a nice line in which Wenwu rejects the Mandarin title because it’s an orange) and has got himself clean. It’s always nice to see other actors from the MCU – Wong is great value, and there’s a nice post-credit scene with him, Carol Danvers and Bruce Banner (‘Welcome to the circus’) talking to Shang-Chi and Katy about the unknown nature of the Ten Rings.

I found the first two-thirds of the film the stronger – the action scenes (the bus fight is a phenomenal Jackie Chan sequence), the comedy, the character interaction are all on point. The last third has some of the MCU final-act features, involving very large destruction and the scale exceeding that of what happened before – the very large fight with dragons was awesome but it loses some of the human-level focus that had worked so well (although Ta Lo was beautiful and the mythical creatures were absolutely gorgeous). There are other minor niggles, such as how Katy somehow being an amazing archer suddenly, or how Shang-Chi is still the best martial artist since all we see him do is some push-ups before going to work and then spend the night drinking and doing karaoke – yes, he trained solidly for 7 years, but he hasn’t done any fighting in the 10 years after that. His sister has been running a cage-fighting syndicate and practising diligently since, so is clearly the better fighter (although I didn’t like that she took over the Ten Rings organisation at the end – it felt a bit too much like Sharon Carter as the Power Broker at the end of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier – but it would explain why she didn’t get much to do in this film if she’s going to be a focus in the sequel).

But, in the end, I really enjoyed this film, which brings wushu into the MCU, opens up another angle to its cinematic universe, remixes the formula that Marvel Studios has working so well – it’s another great entry into the biggest superhero franchise, which must be a tough gig for anyone. I can tell how much I enjoyed the film because I have never liked the song Hotel California, but now I will remember it fondly because of this movie …

Rating: DAVE

The post Notes On A Film: Shang-Chi appeared first on Clandestine Critic.

This version of Captain Marvel – sorry, I mean, Shazam – adheres to the New 52 version of Billy Batson and the Shazam family, as told by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. Billy (Asher Angel) is a 14-year-old boy who has been through many foster systems in Philadelphia, searching for the mother who abandoned him at a funfair. He is placed with the Vasquez family, who already have five foster children, including Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), a superhero fanatic; Billy doesn’t want to bond with his new family, but steps in to help Freddy with bullies at school. When escaping them, he is chased into a subway, where he ends up at the Rock of Eternity. The wizard Shazam (Djimon Housou) senses that Billy is good enough to deserve the power of Shazam to battle against the Seven Sins, so asks Billy to say his name, causing Billy to turn into a superhero in the form of Zachary Levi (a superhero without a name – a running gag is trying to work out what he should be called). Billy confides in Freddy (for his superhero expertise) and they try to examine the limits of the newfound powers. Meanwhile, Thaddeus Sivana (Mark Strong), who was almost given the power of Shazam as a child but was ultimately rejected because he was tempted by the Eye of Sin, has spent his life dedicated to finding the Rock of Eternity to regain the power – he finally succeeds and steals the Eye of Sin and becomes the vessel for the Seven Sins, using his power to kill his father and brother as well as the board of directors of his father’s companies. When he sees Shazam, he goes to confront him to gain the powers for himself …

The film is, as described, Big with superheroics – the film even admits it with a scene that sees Shazam accidentally stepping on a floor piano toy in a nod to the same moment in Big. As such, it has a very clear and easy-to-grasp template, a literal wish fulfilment fantasy, in contrast to some of the other DCEU movies, which makes for a nice change. It feels like a film from the 1980s – Amblin movies have been mentioned as a reference point – with a similarly simplistic attitude and story beats. Levi is great as the child in a man’s body discovering his powers – funny, charming, perfectly capturing the Tom Hanks energy, but with super strength, super speed, invulnerability, lightning bolts (although the wisdom of Solomon seems to be curiously absent). His choice of the age he plays Shazam seems slightly younger than the 14 years of the actual Billy Batson character, but it works because it is at least consistent. Levi plays well off Grazer, creating a nice double act as Shazam becomes a viral video sensation from the clips loaded online.

What is strange is the occasional super-dark moments that seem out of place with the children’s movie at heart – when Sivana kills the board of directors, he unleashes the Seven Sins to do the job: they are monstrous violent creatures who proceed to be violent. Most of it is off-screen, but we see one of the Seven Sins grab a man, put his mouth over his head and then bite down – it didn’t cut away from seeing a man having he head crunched, his body shaking as it happened. It was unexpected to say the least – director David F Sandberg has a horror background and it was allowed to slip in here. (But it’s in keeping with Geoff Johns’ work and his inclusion of excessive violence and dismemberment in his comic books.)

The film doesn’t have a lot of depth (although it makes up for that in length) – everything is pretty straight down the line, nothing unexpected, no twists; even Mark Strong, while his usual top-notch self, is a fairly one-note as the villain. An aside: it felt weird to have a mid-credits sting with Strong to set up the sequel – after the mid-credits sting in Green Lantern in which Strong takes up the yellow ring to become Sinestro for the sequel that never happened, I do hope that it works out for him this time. Another aside: the number of actors playing other characters from comic books is strong in this film: in addition to Green Lantern, Strong has been in Kingsmen and Kick-Ass; Levi was also Fandrall in Thor films; Hounsou was the voice of the King of the Fishermen in Aquaman, Korath the Pursuer in the MCU, and Papa Midnite in Constantine. A related aside: if Marvel ever do a live-action Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, then Faithe Herman (who plays Darla, Billy’s super-happy foster sister) would make a perfect choice for Lunella Lafayette.

The throwback nature of the film didn’t work for me, taking me out of the story – it felt like you were watching a movie with a script and acting from the 1980s with the digital effects of the late 2010s, as if the sophistication that has occurred in the intervening decades hadn’t happened. At least there is some humour to help – there’s the particularly nice gag about Sivana monologuing in the big fight at the end but doing it so far away from Shazam that Shazam can’t hear what he’s saying – plus the previously mentioned chemistry between Levi and Grazer is a lot of fun. It makes up for the dickish nature of Billy Batson and Shazam, which can be a bit grating – I know that the protagonist in a movie has to go through a character arc, but it’s a bit much.

At least this is a DCEU film that realises it’s supposed to be goofy fun and commits to the premise; much like Aquaman, it’s silly and it knows it and enjoys it. I mean, in the mid-credits sting, they even include Mister Mind, the caterpillar-like alien creature with telepathic powers – he looks and sounds ridiculous, but the film isn’t afraid of that. Shazam! is an enjoyable film that perhaps has a better reputation than it deserves simply because it’s not as dour as its DCEU predecessors, but that’s not a bad thing.

Rating: DVD

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