Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye



Review- Seaguy: The Slaves Of Mickey Eye #1


T: Ok- this is going to be a conversational review of Grant Morrison’s "Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye #1(Vertigo)" (participants: Julian and T)

T: 5 years ago, Grant Morrison released the 3 issue miniseries Seaguy, to middling sales and middling reviews. That it took half a decade (and a purported bit of blackmail regarding DC's ‘52’) to release the second arc of Morrison's planned trilogy is a testament to the challenges he faced. While some of the criticisms of Seaguy were well founded, both of us in this conversation are glad it's back.

T: “Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye” begins with a full page splash of our hero looking into a decaying artificial world, in a verbal lament ("i feel terrible"). Seaguy is back on his boat with a new animal companion and the world, despite all that happened in the first series, has not changed all that much (except for some encroaching urban-amusement park sprawl).
Morrison quickly and summarily reintroduces his cast of characters from the first arc, even a few who had seemed to meet their ends there. Other characters are new additions, perhaps most prominently Prof. Silvan Niltoid, the man with the rainbow coming out of his head. Seaguy's trials take him to the "Nod Cholmondley Home For the Bewildered" where we see, as in the first series, that this is a world which does not know how to deal with madness, and is indeed quite phobic of it.
In the end Seaguy finds the next chapter of his story just beginning- the preceding pages having been a sort of slumbering dream from which he may just be waking up. Oh, and now there are four of him.

Julian: Of course, this being Morrison we are invited to question our conception of just who is mad.

T: Right. One of the most notable differences between this series and the last is that Cameron's Stewarts art style has changed dramatically, from a more fully, softly, rendered world to a more heavy, cartoonish one. And of note here is the fact that it felt like such a seamless transition. It wasn’t until i compared pages side by side that I realized just how big a change he'd made. Good stuff.

Julian: The transition was much more abrupt than I first imagined, I agree. I think the first correction that I need to make, though, is that I'm not just glad that Seaguy is back. I think ecstatic would be more appropriate. After his ultimately disappointing run on Batman and Final Crisis, it is a joy to see Morrison return to form with a competent artist.

T: It is funny, because in its initial run Morrison had called Seaguy his antidote to all the dark-gritty-somber heroes out there. So after all the damage he did during Final Crisis and the rest, its almost as if Morrison needed self-therapy or something. And this sunshiny spirit also seems evident in his Batman & Robin run.

Julian: I thought he got that out of his system with The Invisibles. But yeah, I do think there's an element of that in Seaguy.

T: Well, he's having fun here, and his ideograms and references aren't nearly as entrenched as those in Seven Soldiers or any of the other major-universe work he's done. He's got a blank canvas here.

Julian: Certainly, and that really is when he's at his best. Still though, I think this is a very menacing story. I think in some ways, Cameron Stewart's more cartoonish art is almost more unnerving than it is evocative of, say, childhood nostalgia, and that has as much to do with Morrison's writing as it does with Stewart's considerable skills.

T: Oh it is- I’m only referring to the way the hero reacts to the world he inhabits. I know this is supposed to be the "teenage/young adult leg" of the journey to adulthood, and I suppose I’m thinking back to the first series which gave the 'childhood' perspective. However, it does still seem that Morrison has cast Seaguy as a hero with a heart. A guy who'll overcome the odds even if it’s only through delusional means…
…Y’know what i just noticed? for all the marked stylistic differences between the first series and the current one, there's one character whose model hasn’t really changed: Death, though he does seem a bit more bleached in the bones now.

Julian: Death's role in the series has been something I've gone back and forth on. At some times he seems very connected to Mickey Eye; I mean, his eyes for one thing, and the phrase "When you live, when you die... here comes Mickey Eye!" both seem to indicate a connection to me. At other times, I'm not so sure.

T: I think what I get from the first series is that death isn't the real villain here. As Death states during his pseudo-chess match with Seaguy: "the rules seem so arbitrary!" Death is more befuddled than anything. And as Seaguy mentions to his sidekick Chubby, Death is "color blind and can’t tell black from white", but these are two different issues of course, as black should be easily discernible from white, even to the colorblind. Note that Seaguy plays with death and does not complain- and he wins. Chubby threatens death and is immediately threatened in return

Julian: Those are very good points.

T: And in this new issue we see unequivocally that Death is just as subject to the militant force of Mickey Eye as any other character. I think what's going on in Seaguy's world is a bit of the "things far worse than death" angle. And I think a lot of it is a result of the substance XOO and it's widespread use in the world.

Julian: I was just going to say we should talk about XOO.

T: This is one thing that felt like a bit of the letdown. The end of the first series seemed to indicate dwindling supplies of XOO, possibly gone for good- and that indicated a real, if hollow, change in the world. but now it seems to be in full production once again. XOO, to me, is Morrison once again cribbing from Philip K Dick. This is his UBIK, and it’s an edible variety. It represents a fascistic world’s lust for the new, and how this lust overpowers and replaces the actual qualities of the things it is supposed to represent. Everything will always be new, nothing will ever die, but we will never remember anything but a hallucinatory present.

Julian: But I don't think its ever referred to as XOO in this issue. It's 1/2 an Animal on a Stick now.

T: Good point, but it still seemed like the actual substance/life form itself had been liberated in the first arc. Of course, it’s also the bubble gum the professor refers to as one half of what Mickey Eye created the world out of (the other element being Flame)

Julian: Oh definitely. "Am-Dek-Gum. GIDT". I think the change in name reinforces this idea of fascistic lust for the new. A constant hollow change in window dressing overshadowing the underlying issues. XOO is always a subjugated agent of control, constantly being renamed but never really replaced.

T: do you want to talk about that moment you noticed?

Julian: Yeah, all right. The moment that really struck the deepest chord with me in this issue was the scene where Seaguy asks Death where Chubby is, and Death replies that "he's right behind you". Seaguy just looks utterly disappointed and replies asking "You really think I'm gonna fall for that?". But of course Chubby is right behind him, suddenly for an instant; and for some reason there seemed an implication to me that if Seaguy did turn around Chubby wouldn't be there anymore.

T: I like when comics can do that: give multiple readings. Right. I mean I thought that too- it was an odd expression. Within a page I figured it was just him being xoo-addled and depressed, but I like that it was 'there', a prescience. I didn't go so far to think about Chubby not being there if he'd turned around, that's really cool.

Julian: I think it's not just that moment, but a very prevailing theme throughout the entire issue. With Chubby, always in the background, and partially obscured. Never in the line of sight of Seaguy, yet always plain as day for the reader. A lot of Seaguy is asking epistemological questions of the variety that fuel the most paranoid and the most fantastic of conspiracy theories. I think that Chubby's role in this issue exemplifies that.

T: The world being replaced, again and again, just outside of your peripheral vision. And yes- regarding conspiracies, I think one thing I noted while rereading the first series was the way that comics, and other mediums, attempt to pin down the ineffable as a tangible series of events. Specifically when chubby looks into the sewer and sees the Mickey Eye agents stuffing people into sacks in the sewer, this is a moment we've seen in a variety of forms in variety of different stories; comics, movies, theatre, books. These things never really happen in our lives, but they stand, I think , for those moments of clarity, when we see through the veils with which we're accustomed.

Julian: Also a nice a reference to the underground tunnels at Disney World. In fact, I think that might be the best metaphor for Seaguy. It's growing up and realizing that Disney World is a facade for brick buildings and fast food chains. Only taken one step further, because here, Disney World is reality. And knowing Walt Disney and his company, the allegory isn't entirely unwarranted.

T: Another metaphor is the role XOO plays as a subjugated party to the proceedings, but not one without its own defenses. Note the two catastrophic counterattacks on the XOO freighters, and the failure of even Seaguy and Chubby to maintain a rapport with the bit of xoo they'd been helping escape; "it’s not the xoo we knew".

Julian: I want to go back to what you said about putting the ineffable in concrete terms. Because I was just reminded of the revelation of Chubby, and the scientists pulling a hear no/see no/speak no evil. With the one of them crying out to himself "There's nothing there! If there was you could prove it!" In the midst of Bedlam. As a side, would you say it's reaching to say that Nod Cholmondley is a play on Noam Chomsky?

T: The one thing I know about it is how to pronounce it. Years ago I was researching names for a story I was writing, and I know that its pronounced "chumley". The anecdote goes: An English gentleman meeting the Earl of Cholmondeley one day coming out of his own house, and not being acquainted with him, asked him if Lord Chol-mond-e-ley (pronouncing each syllable distinctly) was at home. "No," replied the peer, without hesitation, "nor any of his pe-o-ple." Chumley,chums? Nod chums? Sleeping chums? The big sleep? This*is* where chubby finally reapears.

Julian: That's an interesting thought. May be a bit of a stretch.

T: But I like Noam Chomskey too, and that's probably got more legs. Has Morrison ever referenced him before?

Julian: I don't know that he has. It just struck me that psychology plays a major role in this series; and Chomsky is the epitome of a functionalist. Then again, that might be giving Morrison too much credit.

T: I kind of hope you're right.

Julian: Arkham Asylum was supposed to be about psychology, but I never saw anything in there to make me think Morrison knew jack of what he was talking about.

T: yeh....sigh.

Julian: To be fair, though. Morrison has matured since that book, and Seaguy is definitely evidence of this. Morrison has said that he wants this to be his Watchmen, and given that we both really just scratched the surface of what there is to talk about this series, it is going to be a joy to really get deeper into this book in the coming months; and that's really a special thing for a monthly comic even if it's a limited series.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Check Out This Fucking T-Shirt

As we all know, with the emergence of the superhero flicks, this has been a good time for nerd merch. I'm not really one for action figures, but I do keep an eye open for superhero t-shirts. You can find them in pretty much every clothing store in America these days, but most of those are shitty cartoonized versions of movie posters. It's pretty difficult to find a superhero-themed t-shirt that isn't too plain, too ugly, or too event-comic-double-page-spready. I don't need Michael Turner art on a t-shirt.

(We speak ill of the dead here at CotU.)

Basically, a superhero t-shirt needs to be retro. It lends that pop art quality that a Marvel Zombies cover just doesn't have (looking at you, Hot Topic). Also, whoever it is that makes these goddamn things thinks that just by plastering any comic image onto cotton, they have a good t-shirt. Fuck those guys! A comic shirt has to be a GOOD-LOOKING SHIRT that just happens to be comic-related.

That said, check out this fucking t-shirt.



BLAM! Giant-Size X-Men. They aren't lying--they are presented in a large fashion. The art is courtesy of Seventies Dave Cockrum. Mostly. Whoever made this shirt (the tag just says Marvel Comics) slapped an image of Magneto on top of the original cover art. I dunno if it's Cockrum, but it works.

What separates this t-shirt is the little details, though. Fading the image to make it look older isn't new to shirts with old comic art, but it's nice. It just seems better on this one than it seems on a lot of others. But what really works is the lightly-printed interior art on the blue of the shirt.


Now, I'm no X-Men scholar. The only full runs of it that I've read have been Morrison's and Whedon's, and they're the only two that I've liked (Brubaker sucked, Carey sucked, and I won't read Fraction's because of the shitty art). After looking up Proteus in Wikipedia, I discovered that this is John Byrne's work. Aside from Jean and Cyke here at the bottom, Storm shows up down there (I cut her out of the picture because...Storm sucks), and at the top of the shirt you can see what looks to me like Bashee standing next to Colossus-with-his-head-cut-off, both also by Byrne, I would have to assume. All in all, a pretty sweet t-shirt I think, and I wish more of them were this good.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Quotes On Comics

"Comic books [in Mexico] are one of the few sources of accessible reading matter for the poor and semiliterate sectors of society and, as such, they not only offer entertainment but also play a crucial role in the dissemination of information and ideology."


Quotes On Comics is a great collection of quotes on various aspects of comics and their place in culture. (via Drawn)

here are a few more good ones:

"As every schoolboy knows, comics do not stand alone at microphones in the dark. Indeed, we cannot even read them in the dark. We need light, the more, the better. And we enjoy comics best in solitary, by ourselves, not in crowds; although large numbers of people read comics, they generally do it by themselves, in silence."

Robert C. Harvey


The cartoon art form — the art of treating an image impressionistically — will not fade. It will keep growing in popularity, because a cartoon is able to convey an idea as an image, and images are the means of communication that are proliferating.
Will Eisner

Personally, I don’t have a problem with the fact that comic books have grown up. I do wonder, though, if perhaps comic books are now being taken a little too seriously.

Susan Tomaselli


Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Monday, March 9, 2009

Watchmen Review: T's Take

The most perfect part of Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ alternate reality graphic novel) was the pure comic-book yellow that filled the screen for the first 5 seconds of the film. I thought to myself ‘this is the most this film can ever be’. Then the credits rolled, I was fairly impressed by the "3D-as-2D through angled camera flashes" montage sequence, and the film began.

Snyder has said in a few interviews that he wanted to ‘kill the superhero movie’ just as Moore and Gibbons’ killed the superhero comicbook. If that's his goal, I figure let's judge him by his own standard and see how well he did.
I can see that Snyder wanted to do for Watchmen what Peter Jackson did for Tolkien’s trilogy. You get an honest sense of love and admiration for the source material, and a keen eye. But as a result it also suffers from biopic-syndrome (the comic itself being the biographer’s focus). Favorite comic moments, quotes, and images are lavishly recreated. Others are mixed and matched, *sort of* referring to things that actually happened, but not quite. And all the while the dramatic structure gets lost under the weight of getting all those fractured moments ‘just right’. This is part of the reason why Snyder’s assassination mission is doomed to fail. Strike one.

The film isn’t all bad. I did find myself wondering/realizing things about the Characters as well as Moore’s possible thought process while watching the film, things that had never occurred to me when reading the comic (admittedly I’m not an acolyte of Moore’s Graphic Novel, coming to it too late, after its shock value and ideological novelty were gone). No, its not all bad, but there is a LOT of bad. Snyder’s previous effort was 300, based on the Graphic Novel by Frank Miller. Misogynistic and in love with gratuitous violence, Miller can almost be thought of as the Anti-Moore. And yet, in Snyder’s adaptation, he never gives us Alan Moore’s Watchmen. He passes it through some transmogrifying Alternate Reality portal and delivers....poof! Frank Miller’s Watchmen!

The performances come from what I’d call the “Tales From The Darkside” school of acting. Certain performers rise above this at times, but all have moments of wooden staginess. And the love of action, while not always inappropriate, is often so. The film would have been better served to reserve glossy action sequences for one or two well-chosen characters and allow the rest to perform as unglamorously as the source material suggests. This is strike two on Snyder’s assassination mission.

Finally… for a director who’s so self-professedly in love with the source material, (he does impressively cover the lion’s share of the Graphic Novel’s plot, even if most of the novels’ supplemental materials get cast off*) he seems to have no grasp of what's essential. The film is paced fairly well for a three hour movie, but the moments where he ignores either the letter or the intent of the book are made all the more aggravating by this supposed devotion.
In the end, Snyder doesn’t have the heart to land the bullet squarely between the genre’s eyes. At best he lands a glancing blow, a flesh wound, and that’s probably fitting; Snyder shows throughout that he is most concerned with the novels’ surfaces. Problem is, surfaces were the very thing Moore was trying to get beyond.

*this absence kept me thinking as i watched that this really could have worked as an HBO miniseries, and they coudlve included those supplemental materials as either bumpers or online minifilms/articles/photos/etc.


As a side note, if there are any New Yorkers interested in the depth and multiple layer’s Julian refers to in his review, you might want to check out the link below. My friend Jeffrey Lewis is giving a lecture based in part on his Senior Thesis “The Dual Nature of Apocalypse in Watchmen” at Jim Hanley’s Universe on March 19th, 8PM. Should be awesome.

Link To Details for Jeff Lewis' FREE lecture at Jim Hanley's

Watchmen

Watchmen is a strange film. The more I think about it, the less it seems that I should like it. It fails Hitchcock's litmus test, and yet I have to say it: I liked Watchmen. Despite its flaws – and it is a very flawed film– the movie's triumphs are entertaining, thought provoking, and on rare occasions deeply moving. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons seminal limited series needs no introduction among even the most neophyte of comic book connoisseurs, so forgive me if this is treading well walked ground but it's impossible to talk about this movie without at least touching on the themes of its inspiration.

Watchmen is an incredibly dense narrative with multiple layers of meaning and a spider's web of connections. It is at once a political thriller, a meta-textual deconstruction of the superhero, a meditation on power dynamics in society, and polemic of the major philosophies that have driven the better part of the twentieth century; and that's just naming a few off the top of my head. Terry Gilliam dropped the project, famously calling it unfilmable, this was followed by a good two decades of development hell that seemed to prove him right and helped to strengthen Moore's faith in Glycon.

For his part, Snyder's film focuses on translating the main plot of the book with a devotion that is obviously heartfelt, but perhaps ultimately misguided. The most ubiquitous criticism of this movie seems to be that it was too slavish to the material. I'm not entirely convinced that's the case. Indeed, most of the movie's weakest bits are when it deviates from the material. The problem with this film, is that Zack Snyder is not an actor's director. He has a very strong sense of the tableau, as evidenced by the lavish opening credit sequence. In a sense, this is a strength, as comics are all about the tableau. Unfortunately, when it comes to coaxing performances out of actors, or simply accommodating them, Snyder is woefully out of his element; and in a film filled with outlandish characters his actors are paddling upstream the entire time to inject some much needed humanity into the story.

Luckily, most of the main cast is up to the lion's share of the work. Billy Crudup is the standout performance, his frail and lonely god is incredibly nuanced and though he is certainly disconnected he is also sympathetic. Patrick Wilson and Jackie Earl Haley both brought touches of their characters from Little Children to their respective roles as Nite Owl and Rorschach. Haley, in particular, took one of the most grandiose of misanthropes and managed to not only make him believable (without the benefit of a decent back story) but also make the word “hurm” sound entirely natural. Morgan's Comedian is sometimes stilted by simply impossible lines; but his cynical amusement with the disgusting elements of civilization is on the money, and “Jesus Christ Sal, can't a guy talk to... to his old friend's daughter?” is one of the best moments of the film. Goode is a convincing intellectual, but his cold distance makes him entirely unsympathetic. Ackerman is the actress who needed a director's guidance most of all, her performance, along with most of the supporting cast is stilted and perfunctory.

Seeing as the actors, for the most part, seemed to have such a firm grasp on their characters, it's a shame that Hayter and Tse didn't. Rorschach's misanthropy remains intact, but his Objectivist outlook is noticeably neutered, if not removed entirely. Dr. Manhattan's judgment of humanity is turned into a trite lover's note. Ozymandias never gets a chance to ask Jon whether he did right in the end or admire Alexander's solution to the riddle of the Gordian Knot. Not that it matters because we never see the locksmith fix Dan's door. While that last detail is an example of the kind of subtlety this movie sorely lacks, the first three examples were a matter of a few lines, and so their absence is both frustrating and confusing. Snyder has said that there is about an hour of footage that didn't make this cut, while there are people who would say the movie is already too long as it is, I'm anxiously anticipating the Director's Cut in the hopes that it gives the third act the time it desperately needed to breath and the context that it deserved.

Looking back on this review, it seems that this movie has precious little to offer. Still, I find myself remembering the stand off between Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach, the quiver in Haley's lip as he begs for release from a world he cannot be a part of, the pain in Crudup's voice as he laments that for all he is capable of he “can't change human nature”, and I can't bring myself to call this a bad movie. Warts and all, it works.

Monday, February 23, 2009

so here it is...

Comics, Music, Film, Books, and more all reviewed by three miscreants. stay tuned.

here's a theory link to get started: Comics Theory 101: Loopy Framing