Big Trouble in Little China (Legacy Edition Book One)

October 7, 2023April 23, 2024 / Alex Good / 11 Comments

Big Trouble in Little China (Legacy Edition Book One)

Ever since its cult status began to grow there’s been talk of a sequel to John Carpenter’s 1986 action flick Big Trouble in Little China. It’s never happened, but there were other spin-offs like various games (card, board, and video) as well as this comic-book series, which Carpenter himself had a hand in writing. Would a second movie, should it ever happen, be based on these comics? I don’t think so, though I’m sure they could (and likely would) do worse.

Fans of the movie will be pleased with what they’ve done here. I know I was. Things pick up literally right where the movie ends, beginning with Jack delivering his envoi from the cab of the Pork-Chop Express about what Jack Burton always says on a night when “the poison arrows fall from the sky, and the pillars of heaven shake.” Then the ape creature attacks but it turns out he’s actually bonded with Jack now. Jack calls him Pete and gives him a t-shirt and baseball cap to wear.

Before long all the rest of the original cast are in play as well. Jack’s buddy and his lady love Miao Yin (now revealed to be a kick-ass martial artist too). Egg Shen, dispensing various bits of arcane knowledge and smoke bombs. And of course Lo Pan as the evil wizard. The only character missing is Gracie Law, though she’s briefly shown to be in Tibet “campaigning for the ethical treatment of livestock” amongst some uncomprehending yak herders.

You may have figured that Lo Pan was dead at the end of the movie, and he was. But when you die in this universe you only go to one of many hells – in Lo Pan’s case it’s the Hell of Those Killed by Idiots – from whence you can be summoned back by various rites. So basically there’s a lot more supernatural action in these comics as Lo Pan and Jack shuttle back and forth from various infernal realms, bickering with each other all the way.

I think they did a great job with these comics. The art is fun, though I didn’t think Jack looked much like Kurt Russell. There’s an interesting plot filled with familiar jokes like the “Who?” “Me, Jack Burton!” exchange and lots of novel monsters and mythological beasts inhabiting the demonic realm, including a sidekick Jack adopts and names Slinky who looks a bit like Dave Sim’s Cerebus. The new wrinkles are mostly pretty good too, including some flashbacks to Jack’s disastrous early marriages (wives three and four were a vampire and a witch respectively), and a jarringly sentimental first Mrs. Burton who I didn’t think was needed. Finally, as things wind up a nice final panel introduces Jack to the twenty-first century and what are sure to be more great adventures. This wasn’t a series I was expecting much out of, but it left me looking forward to more.

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BRZRKR: Volume One

September 30, 2023April 23, 2024 / Alex Good / 13 Comments

BRZRKR: Volume One

So this is the Keanu Reeves comic. That’s him prominently glowering on the cover, topped off with his John Wick hair styling (hey, it makes more sense, and is better marketing, than Neil Gaiman appearing as the Sandman). And that’s also Reeves with the lead writing credit. Though I don’t know how the duties were split between Reeves and co-writer Matt Kindt. This was Reeves’ first comic and Kindt is a vet.

Anyway, with Reeves being a hot property at the time it was a title that launched with a very successful Kickstarter campaign ($1.4 million) and it sold very well too. Of course, franchising wasn’t far behind and a film and anime series have both been announced. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

The Berserker (or Unute, which means weapon or tool in his ur-language) is a guy born 80,000 years ago, which is quite a ways back in terms of the evolution of modern humans. I mean, there’s no way he would have been born into an advanced tribal community like the one that’s shown here on that timeline, but I think we’re just playing around with Conan chronology. Anyway, if you’re wondering how the Big B has managed to live so long it’s because he’s the hybrid child of a human mother and maybe a god – a god who takes the form of a charge of electricity, with the moment of conception being a coital zap. When baby Unute grows up he becomes a killing machine, massacring all the enemies of his tribe and then continuing to be an ultimate, unkillable warrior down through the centuries. Or millennia.

Most of this book (collecting issues 1-4) is flashback, with the story being told by Unute to a doctor looking to unlock the secrets of the Berserker’s DNA and finding only “incongruous amino acids” and “quantum molecules” (science!). These flashbacks consist mainly of blood-soaked carnage. Unute has a thing for punching his fist right through people and tearing heads off. He even rips a horse’s head off at one point. Guts and gore are splattered everywhere, in battle scenes that recalled those in 300 only with more splatter. The Berserker himself even gets torn apart and shot up with arrows and spears and bullets, but his super healing power lets him recover quickly.

That healing power is just one of the clichés on display here, in what is a fairly conventional origin story that doesn’t have a lot of time for talk. And the character of the Berserker is also a bit dull: the warrior tired of violence who now only wants to die. 80,000 years is a long grind. Maybe they translated his name into a license plate for the title of the comic just to spice him up a bit.

But to give it its due, I thought this was a respectable kick-off. The art gets kind of slack when there’s no fighting (look at that drawing of the “undisclosed U.S. government facility”), but it really comes to life when Unute is kicking ass and tearing his enemies apart limb from limb or spattering their brain jelly all over his fists. I also got to the end thinking there was some potential here, especially if they could find a villain capable of matching Unute’s level of violence. The goal here was to leave readers wanting more, and in that respect they did their job.

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Batwoman: Volume 1 Hydrology

September 23, 2023April 23, 2024 / Alex Good / 11 Comments

Batwoman: Volume 1 Hydrology

This version of Batwoman was part of DC’s New 52 reset that launched in 2011 (the “zero” issue that kicks this collection off came out in 2010, but details). As such it has to introduce us to a bunch of new versions of some old characters and define their relations to each other. This is always busy work that distracts us from any main storyline, which is what happens here. And that’s a shame because I was interested in the La Llorona plot and the whole merging of superhero and horror elements and I thought this got short shrift in the end.

Overall though I thought it was a really good comic. I did want more of the spooky La Llorona but all the world-building stuff was great. Kate Kane could have been a platform figure as a proud lesbian superhero but that part just plays as perfectly normal and not a big deal. She’s still a total sex bomb anyway, with an outfit that gives her torpedo tits with the high beams always on. The Department of Extranormal Operations feels like Hellboy’s B.P.R.D. rebranded and is a good fit for Director Bones. Batman remains a shadowy figure so he doesn’t take over, which was nice for a change. I thought the action scenes got confusing through shattered page layouts, but the fight between Flamebird and the Hook scored points for its brutal realism.

I didn’t know what to expect from this one since Batwoman isn’t a character I’ve ever followed much but Hydrology was a pleasant surprise and made me want to check out the next volume anyway. You can’t ask for much more from stuff like this.

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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

September 16, 2023April 23, 2024 / Alex Good / 6 Comments

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

I don’t envy Peter Kuper taking on the challenge of adapting Heart of Darkness. It’s one of those classic works that every well-read person knows forward and back. Not only are there a half-dozen famous scenes and dramatic lines that readers will already have their own imaginative reconstruction of, but there’s also Coppola’s Apocalypse Now playing somewhere in the background. Even if Marlon Brando’s plus-sized Colonel Kurtz doesn’t correspond to the emaciated figure in Conrad, I think it likely that most people see Brando when Marlow finally gets to the Inner Station, the end of the line.

Put another way, everyone has their own Heart of Darkness and all you can really ask is that an illustrator not colour outside the lines too much. For example, Kuper takes a couple of what I think are minor items from the text and leans on them pretty heavily. First there’s Marlow’s pipe, which he’s seen handling throughout. There is I think only one reference to Marlow smoking a pipe in the Conrad’s book, and that comes in one of the moments that takes us back outside of the main narrative. At the beginning of the story he doesn’t have a pipe because both his hands are described as placed palms outward like an idol. The other image is that of crocodiles in the jungle. I believe Conrad mentions alligators (which must be wrong) only once. In any event, I didn’t think of them as having as big a presence as they do here.

There was only one point though that I strongly disagreed with. This is Kuper’s rendering of the ship shelling the coast. I think Conrad makes it clear that the shelling, like the fusillade of gunfire that the pilgrims launch into the riverside jungle later, is totally useless. The jungle is like a giant green sponge that absorbs cannon- and gunfire without being affected in any visible way. But Kuper includes a panel from the native point of view that has Africans in the jungle running away from the cannon shells. This made no sense at all to me.

The visual motif that stood out the most was that of the spiral. This is the way the sun is presented throughout, and it’s also used for people’s eyes to show madness (as with the doctor who examines Marlow before his setting out, and for Kurtz at the end). It’s also the spiral snake that is the Congo River, and so gives the impression of a vortex that’s swallowing Marlow just as it’s already consumed Kurtz. My favourite motif though was the way the jungle is presented as a tapestry of foliage of faces and figures. This wallpaper effect works especially well because there’s no sharp distinction between blacks and whites but only shades of grey, giving the forest an urban-camouflage effect.

But overall I have to say I felt a lack of punch to the proceedings. Giving “The horror! The horror!” two double-page spreads seemed like Kuper was trying too hard to make up for something he really wasn’t feeling. But then, as Marlow insists, Kurtz is a voice, and how can any narrator, or artist, render that?

So it’s a responsible adaptation, but I came away thinking Kuper wasn’t a great fit for this material, as he was for his Kafka adaptations. It seems to me that Heart of Darkness needs something like that fantastic, psychedelic note of expressionism that Coppola and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro brought to it. Conrad’s prose can be maddeningly vague and ambiguous, but (and at the same time) it can also be precise, emotionally fraught, lurid, and bombastic. I wouldn’t call Kuper’s approach conservative here, but there’s something in Conrad he wasn’t reaching.

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Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume One

September 9, 2023April 23, 2024 / Alex Good / 6 Comments

Swamp Thing: The Bronze Age Volume One

The roots of Swamp Thing, to make use of an appropriate metaphor, are in horror comics. This first Bronze Age collection actually gives us two origin stories though, with the creature’s first slightly hang-dog appearance in the DC horror/dark fantasy/mystery comic House of Secrets and then the reworked version when he was given his own series a little over a year later.

But even after rebranding as a superhero, the world he inhabited would continue to be that of genre horror. After the first issue of the regular series he’s immediately whisked away to a castle with “Caligarian corridors” that’s located in Transylvania (or Universal’s backlot, or somewhere thereabouts) where he meets the mad scientist Arcane, his Plasticine creations the Un-Men, and a Frankenstein’s monster called the Patchwork Man. Then it’s off to the Scottish moors and a date with a werewolf. Still to come are a killer robot, an alien, and even a Lovecraftian Ancient One called M’Nagalah. Somehow they skipped vampires.

That probably sounds terribly derivative, and it is, but I thought the stories were all pretty interesting, and Len Wein isn’t averse to lathering up some of that purple comic-book prose to paint a scene with. Get a load of this scene setting: “The darkness cries – a long mournful wail that writhes through the gnarled cypress branches like a breath of Hades’ wing, skipping over the placid surface of the stagnant mire below . . .” And Bernie Wrightson’s art also has a feel for the grotesque that sets the right note.

The Swamp Thing himself makes a great hero. At least he’s always been a favourite of mine. Blown up in a lab experiment, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Alec Holland runs into the swamp, where his bio-restorative formula brings him back to life as an anthropomorphic moss-man, 89 inches tall and 547 pounds – “apparently all muscle!” Bullets don’t have any effect on him and if a limb gets sliced off it grows back in no time. I liked the idea of him not being able to communicate and so being mistaken as the monster that killed Alec Holland who then gets hunted by the series Ahab, Matt Cable, even though this later gets tossed away.

As for the wild, globe-hopping adventures, I don’t think sales were very strong and they may have just been trying to find something that would stick. There’s even a Batman cameo thrown in with one of the less fanciful episodes. You’ve always gotta work the crossovers.

In sum it’s a crazy and colourful mix of the surreal with a whack of different genre tropes, from horror to SF to dark fantasy to your standard superhero fare. You can see why so many different creators have been drawn to such a protean figure over the years, without ever being able to pin him down.

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September 9, 2023April 4, 2026 / Alex Good / 6 Comments