Author: Alex Good

X marks the spot

/ Alex Good / 10 Comments

Today, President Joe Biden announced that he won’t be standing for re-election. This didn’t come as a big surprise, as it had become evident, glaringly evident since his debate performance against Trump, that he could no longer communicate and hence campaign effectively. What surprised me, and something I still can’t explain, is that he made the announcement by posting a letter on the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).

Why X? The platform is not a trusted or respected news source. Nor is it even a platform with that great a reach. Its prominence, even back when it was Twitter, was always overstated mainly because it was used by a lot of reporters.

It is also owned by Elon Musk, someone who has pledged massive funding to elect Biden’s rival.

Biden could have got air time or coverage on any network or platform or service and the statement would have been picked up and immediately re-posted and broadcast everywhere else. So why was it released on X? I’ve never had a Twitter or X account, and only used to go on it occasionally to scroll through some posts back when it was Twitter because they let you do that without registering. You can’t do that anymore, which is one of the reasons X has been losing traffic as well as revenue since Musk’s takeover.

I think Biden dropping out was the right call. He’s much too old. Trump is also much too old, but he’s in a category all his own. Leaving that aside though, I don’t see why Biden would make such an important announcement on a platform like X. Surely there was a better way to break the news.

Batman: Damned

/ Alex Good / 24 Comments

Batman: Damned

Batman: Damned is a sequel of sorts to the Joker comic put out by the same writer and artist ten years earlier but it was also the first comic to be published under the imprint of DC’s Black Label, which was targeted at mature audiences. The first printing of Damned even included a picture of a nude Bruce Wayne with his dick hanging out, and there are few things as adult as Batman’s dick. So . . . it was something old and something new. But what I really found it to be was overblown and confusing.

The blame, in my opinion, falls on Brian Azzarello. I really didn’t like the writing on any level. Most of it is woefully ungrammatical, no matter who is speaking. The Enchantress I could give a pass too since she’s a demon zombie witch or something so I figure she can say “I be fate written. Die cast. Why you no remember?” But why are Batman’s “diaries” full of stuff like “what don’ kill us eats us alive”? Why are the rapper’s rhymes so weak? Why does the homeless guy say things like “seen him with my own too [sic] eyes”? Why would the mandarin Waynes say things like “Don’t be here when I do get back”? Were these typos? In a prestige publication like this? Or did they have some meaning I was missing? Hell, I even hated the lettering. This was all terrible.

Then there was the plot, which was another take on the idea of the journey of the soul after death. The aim was to do a sort of horror comic, but I was too confused to find any of it very scary or unnerving. So as usual it just turned out dark. There were cameos from figures I didn’t know well (John Constantine, the Spectre) or barely at all (the Enchantress). And there’s an uncomfortable appearance by Harley Quinn, who nearly rapes Batman at one point because . . . she hates him. I didn’t need any of this. But then Swamp Thing shows up and I always like to see Swampy so that was a plus.

It looks fantastic. Lee Bermejo’s art is on point with the noir-horror vibe throughout, making me almost wish DC had done the book as one of those comics without words. I might have followed the story just as well. I’ve really liked some of Azzarello’s stuff, but this struck me as a poorly developed idea that tried to make up for its deficiencies with lots of heavy breathing and broken English. And that’s a shame because I did have the sense it could have been something great.

Graphicalex

Marple: The Companion

/ Alex Good / 15 Comments

Miss Marple got her start in the Tuesday Night Club, and that series was followed up by stories that took a very similar form: dinner guests listen to someone recount a mysterious event that they either witnessed or had heard about, and then the others engage in a competition to see who can solve it. Of course, Miss Marple always wins, not because she’s a great detective (meaning someone who goes out looking for clues, or questioning witnesses), but because she’s good at just sitting back and drawing on her experience of village life, which always provides a key to understanding what’s really going on.

This happens again in “The Companion,” which was another story I enjoyed even if I thought the solution was too easy. I know it was too easy because I had no trouble figuring it out as I was reading, something that rarely happens. And I managed even though one of the clues was the comparison made between two women, one being a bit plump and the other “inclined to scragginess.” Scragginess is not a word I’ve ever used and I’m not even sure if I’ve seen it before, though I did make the connection to scraggly. So all-in-all a nice little mystery story, with a bit of vocabulary-building thrown in.

Marple index

Garbage Man

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Garbage Man

There’s a bit at the beginning of Aaron Lopresti’s Garbage Man comic (which is not the sequel to Derf Backderf’s Trashed) where the hero, now an animated pile of toxic sludge complete with bits of rebar sticking out of him, has flashbacks as to how he got that way. As things turn out, he was a corporate lawyer named Richard Morse investigating the goings-on at Titan Chemicals. Titan had been given a government contract to create super-soldiers by injecting test subjects with an HGH (Human Growth Hormone) derivative, combined with a bit of creative gene splicing. The mad doctor in charge at Titan, figuring Morse knew too much, had made him into one of the project’s guinea pigs, and in a lab explosion Morse was propelled into a nearby swamp, from which he then arose as Garbage Man.

When the mad doctor is letting Morse know what he’s going to do to him he says “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.” Which is Lopresti’s way of letting you know that, yeah, we’ve all heard this one before. Basically Garbage Man is a cross between Swamp Thing and the Toxic Avenger, with Hellboy’s granite hand thrown in for good measure. He actually looks a lot like Swamp Thing too, so much so that when another experiment gone bad appears that looks even more like Swampy it seems redundant (this latter figure is called Mossy Man).

I liked the art and colours here, but the story really is pretty basic stuff, and the not-so-basic stuff (like the guy who dreams dinosaurs into life) is a mess. Garbage Man slowly remembers, in fits and starts, what happened to him and so he goes after the people responsible. Along the way he’s helped by a preacher who lives among the homeless in the city’s sewers, and an old flame who, remarkably, isn’t too freaked out by his appearance. There’s also a trio of superhero types called the Night Club that play an ambiguous role. Maybe if the series continues we’ll find out more about them. But as far as I know this is all the Garbage Man we’ve got.

The individual comics/chapters are only ten pages long so things move really quickly. And it’s fun. But at the same time it didn’t really strike me as anything special and the story itself is very worn. Good as a diversion then, but not a comic I’m likely to remember very long or want to bother re-reading anytime soon.

Graphicalex

Unwelcome guests

/ Alex Good / 11 Comments

I don’t like groundhogs. They were the one animal I would hunt while living in the country. But in my last years on the farm they had all but disappeared, hunted to extinction by wild dogs.

Unfortunately, when I moved I discovered that they had relocated to the city before me. And now I can’t even shoot them.

Bookmarked! #44: Bookstores No More V: Lichtman’s News and Books

/ Alex Good / 20 Comments

I think I only visited Lichtman’s a half dozen times when I was living in Toronto. Back then they were actually Canada’s biggest chain of independent book stores. Their first store opened in 1909 in Toronto, and they filed for bankruptcy in 2000 for all the usual reasons (competition from the big box stores and online retailers).

Book: Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino

Bookmarked Bookmarks

Man-Bat

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Man-Bat

A straightforward, self-contained five-issue story arc by Dave Wielgosz that has Batman sort of fighting and sort of teaming up with Man-Bat (Dr. Kirk Langstrom) to take on Scarecrow.

I don’t really know much about Man-Bat but he struck me as a very similar character to Marvel’s Lizard: another doctor with a monstrous alter ego he keeps trying to find a cure for. But then I guess you could take the same model further back to Dr. Bruce Banner and the Hulk, and before that to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s some truth, maybe a lot of truth, to the idea that there are only a handful of stories and characters that we keep recycling. This one expresses the notion that we all have a dark side or primal id that we try to control but that keeps erupting in violent and dangerous ways.

The Freudian model or myth (which can be taken as another version of the same story) is useful here because Langstrom/Man-Bat is literally put on the couch by Harley Quinn (a trained psychologist, she reminds us), and subliminally conditioned by Scarecrow (Dr. Jonathan Crane being another doctor of psychology). Is Langstrom barking up the wrong tree in trying to find a cure for his Man-Bat condition in a lab? Maybe all he needs is therapy. Then again, therapy doesn’t seem to have rid Batman of any of his demons, which are released here by a sonic gun Scarecrow invented that unleashes the basest instincts of all the citizens of Gotham.

It’s not a ground-breaking comic in any way, but I found it quick and entertaining. Sumit Kumar’s art has a bit of a manga flavour to it, and the covers by Kyle Hotz and Alejandro Sánchez are great. I even had to laugh at the cover for issue #1, which clearly has the silhouette of the Bat Signal looking like Man-Bat’s balls hanging down from his crotch. I don’t think that was an accident. They knew what they were doing!

Graphicalex