Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt Issue #7.  Circa 1992.

I love it when something so seemingly unimportant unleashes all these associated memories ranging from food smells to parental admonishments. It’s been happening a lot lately.

Something this profound deserves a nostalgic albeit narcissistic rant. Damn my inarticulacy.

Right now, the upcoming Watchmen film ought to be the least of my worries; but I’ve seriously considered not watching Zack Snyder’s apparently faithful adaptation of the seminal graphic novel. You see, a comic geek scorned is a force to be reckoned with.

The first comic book I remember falling in love with was an issue of Batman (a Man Bat story arc) sometime around 1993. Frequent trips to India allowed me to source comics from airport stalls. Ever read the now discontinued and forgotten Thunderbolt? I have. And I remember specific frames from the book. Perhaps it was an escape from my relatively drama free childhood or maybe it was a rite of passage every young boy went through; whatever it was, I never got over the medium.

Third year of college. Holed up in that room, Watchmen convinced me that the comic book was far more than just colourful frames with conversation bubbles. The Comic Book had become The Graphic Novel. Characters had become morally ambiguous all of a sudden, heroes had become fallible and lofty ideals seemed suspicious. The Superhero concept had been deconstructed. Alan Moore joined the ranks of Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Dave Gibbons that of Rembrandt and Picasso. (Oh yes, comic book nerds are known to make wild exaggerations.)

I’ve been reading the book again; taking in every frame, digesting every line and assimilating concepts, some of which still strain my primitive frontal lobe. The book is an assault on the senses like no other; a work that perhaps was best left untouched.

However, I am mildly curious to see how Snyder translates something this complicated. 300 wasn’t exactly a brilliant film. If he does pull it off, will audiences be able to sit through 3 hours of an uncaring superman, an impotent vigilante and a masked anti hero who goes by the name Rorschach?

The Dark Knight is by far the finest cinema experience I’ve had in the last few years. It’s a rich, dark, complex and compelling crime saga told so brilliantly that you’ll have to remind yourself that it’s based on a comic book character who runs around in a cape and cowl. The film surpasses it’s predecessor on almost every level. A lot has been said about the performances but what struck me the most was the solid writing. The screenplay is outstanding and borrows heavily from The Killing Joke and The Dark Knight Returns with lines that never seem forced and are sure to elicit some sort of debate on vigilantism and surveillance.

Every successful comic book film has to have unforgettable villains and TDK delivers there. Heath Ledger’s Joker is a maniac – an absolute that runs rampant through Gotham. He has no motives and no back story; he simply refers to himself as an ‘agent of chaos’. Ledger’s performance can hardly be called a performance; it’s more or less free form improv. I cannot imagine any other actor inhabiting a character that psychotic. It will go down in history as iconic. Period. Harvey Dent’s character arc is fantastically realized too. Dent is the white knight as opposed to the morally ambiguous Batman; a man Bruce Wayne wishes he was but cannot be. Dent’s transformation into Harvey Two-Face…well, the less said, the better.

Despite taking comic book liberties, the film explores serious themes; mostly dwellings on the nature of heroism and our innate need for heroes. Not once do you feel like it aspires to be something that talks down to you. For once, a comic book film takes itself and the audience seriously and treads that fine line between pulp art and reality.

Sadly, The Dark Knight does have flaws that keep it away from masterpiece territory. The James Gordon arc felt a bit forced at times and the sequence at the beginning with the copycat Bat-men felt like it belonged in a different movie altogether. However, at the end of the day, this is fantastic and mind-blowingly brilliant pop art – a film that raises the bar so high that it’s next to impossible to follow it up with something this good.

9.5/10

(Oh and I have tickets to a double-bill screening of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight for this Sunday. Be jealous.)

- From Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor

Christopher Nolan’s follow up to the brilliant Batman Begins, The Dark Knight is well over half a year away from hitting the cinemas but the first trailer (apart from the teaser) made it’s way online via one of the zillion viral sites promoting the film. The last time I watched a trailer so many times was over 3 years back when the first film was released.

The rusty brown feel of the first film has been replaced by a metallic blue hue, accentuating the cold and menacing tone what with the nemesis being nothing less that Batman’s biggest foe, The Joker. The trailer does give a little too much away (I would have preferred if they downplayed the Joker a bit before the film came out) and does give far too much importance to the explosions and action scenes but fans will be blown away by Heath Ledger’s performance (from the two minutes we get to see) as The Joker…creepy and throughly maniacal. This could very well be every fan’s ultimate wet dream.

Harvey Dent is conspicuously absent from the trailer as is Cillian Murphy’s Scarecrow…here’s hoping it’s worth the wait. In Nolan we trust.

Go here for the trailer in all it’s glory or feast your eyes on the embedded vid below.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=tkT1wdRePco]

If you don’t like the story your culture is writing, it’s not enough to rail against it or say you don’t subscribe to it. You have the obligation to be writing your own story– To be a contributing author of your own culture.

This is exactly what David Mack seems to be doing through his groundbreaking Kabuki series; a powerful comic book series that defies all precedents in the genre and succeeds in creating a visually arresting world like never before.

What jumps at you when you flip through the pages for the first time is the artwork. Unlike traditional comic books, it’s not just pencil and ink that adorn the pages, it’s an amalgamation of various styles ranging from paint to magazine clippings. The story telling too is far from ordinary; characters take up more space than the plot per se. The plot is merely an excuse for rich ideas and musings on consciousness, philosophy, deceit, knowledge of the self and love.

Kabuki is a girl driven by vengeance who dies after massacring The Board of Directors of an evil front called Noh. She is brought back to life and to a mental rehabilitation facility by the Control Corps, where she is reprogrammed but takes on a new identity and flees when she learns that her former associates are after her life. Over the course of the book, the plot hardly moves; Kabuki: The Alchemy is a more of an introspective tale than anything else.

Intellectually and artistically, this book is like nothing I’ve ever come across before. Kabuki is a sort of postmodernist counter culture defying all known rules of story telling and goes to show what a powerful medium the comic book has become over the years.

[Pictures sourced from www.davidmackguide.com]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0934706/

There comes a time when even gods must die.

I think I was in the 3rd grade when the front page of Malayala Manorama (yes, that one) carried the news of Superman being killed off in the comics. Years later I read the landmark The Death of Superman, World Without a Superman, and the Return of Superman comic titles and unlike some people I know didn’t get too emotional but still found the story arc very engrossing. Cheesy but engrossing.

Now, the same (more or less) story has been updated for the current generation (considering short attention spans) as an animated film. Superman: Doomsday follows the events leading to the epic battle between the inter galactic destroyer, Doomsday and our boy blue; and the aftermath.

Comic book purists will be distressed to learn that the plot is drastically different from the books; the only similarity being that Superman dies (sort of) and then later, returns. Lex Luthor unwittingly unleashes Doomsday who/what due to the lack of any cognitive function whatsoever runs amok through Metrolopolis leaving scores dead. Superman tries in vain to stop the rampage and gets beaten up like never before. A 15 minute fight sequence leads to the mother of all Coriolis Effects killing both destroyer and savior (again, sort of) in the process. Metropolis mourns. Lois Lane mourns. Martha Kent mourns.

The next act was pretty weak, with Lex Luthor going bizarrely depressed. In a fit of madness, he clones Superman. The new Superman however while retaining all the powers of the original Man of Steel, has a twisted sense of morality. Plot wise, the rest of the film doesn’t live up to the amazing first act but then again I wasn’t totally disappointed.

The animation is outstanding and the fight sequences are breathtaking. However, there is a lot of blood and a number of on screen deaths which elevates the proceedings to a certain extent; it’s not a children’s cartoon anymore. People die; some are crushed to death while others perish in explosions and one particular gentleman’s skull is crushed by Doomsday.

The voice acting is terrific and I was impressed by Adam Baldwin’s portrayal of Superman. My major complaint was/is that the film was too short and that too much was crammed in. But then again, I’m 23 years old and these things shouldn’t matter right? Right?

Wrong.

7.5/10

A masterpiece of mood. The film follows the aftermath of the Zodiac Killings of 1960 in North California and is based on the non fiction book, Zodiac Unmasked by Robert Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhall).

Technically outstanding, the film has a unique feel to it, thanks mainly to the fact that David Fincher employed the use of the Thompson Viper Filmstream camera. It was shot entirely in uncompressed digital format, and it shows. Every frame in the film looks polished and just about perfect.

The film is extremely well paced and doesn’t really resort to any gore or blood to induce an interest in the proceedings but sadly this film got lost amidst all those tent pole releases this year. David Fincher is a genius as a director (though he did choose some lousy scripts like Panic Room and The Game) and with this, he solidifies his reputation.

9/10

Batman Confidential (Issues #7-9); Lovers and Madmen: Michael Green, Denys Cowan, John Floyd

I had decided to stay off Batman comics for a while ever since the debacle that was/is All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder (Frank Miller/Jim Lee) but this new series seemed too promising considering it was a retelling of the Joker’s origin. The Joker is my favorite Batman villain. The Killing Joke is one of my favorite books. In spite of the over the top antics by the clown prince of crime, I think the Joker is one of the most well thought out characters in the DC universe. Cliches be damned.

Back to the series, so far the issues have been fairly good. The ”re-imagination” goes so far as to give us  an explanation for the Joker’s chelsea grin. The writing is pretty decent and there are even traces of genius in issue number 9. Hopefully, it’ll get better. To me however, art work was the highlight; the penciling is extremely well done giving a gruff look to the characters and their surroundings.

Fingers crossed, hoping that this doesn’t turn out to be another damp squib.

7.5/10 

Illustrated by Kent Williams

Life isn’t life without death. 

In 2002, Darren Aronofsky wanted to make a film on immortality and love but ran into production problems. Unperturbed, he decided to go on but in a different medium; the graphic novel. (Yet, he would later be able to turn an altered version of his story into a film.)

This is perhaps the fourth or fifth time I’ve read it. I don’t know what it was (maybe the loneliness, maybe the spoilt cheese sandwich), but the book struck me like never before. It isn’t just the artwork or the writing, but the idea behind it itself is something I constantly ponder about.

The story has 3 sub plots that are intrinsically connected yet two of them are disconnected from reality as such. Basically, there are three timelines (1532 AD, 1997 and sometime in the future) and all of them have one man (the same man) trying to grasp the mortality of his lover and the fragility of life.

Thomas (1997) is a doctor trying to find a cure for his terminally ill wife, Izzi. In spite of the fact that she has embraced her impending death, Thomas finds it impossible to let go. He wallows in denial but the obvious does happen. This happens somewhere in the middle sandwiched between two other parallel plots.

In 1532, Spain is being threatened by the Church to let go of land that may very well be the home of the Tree of Life. Tomas the Conquistador (paramour of the Spanish queen Isabella) sets out to find this tree only to be met by Mayan savages.

Meanwhile somewhere in the far future (2463 AD), Thomas floats through space accompanied by the tree headed for the nebula Xibalba. He hopes to derive the energy of a dying star to revive the dying tree.

Yes, this is some pretty convoluted and trippy stuff but everything comes together for a satisfying (not so happy) conclusion. The book explores death and the fear of it that keeps one from living life itself.

The art work by Kent Williams is breathtaking to say the least. Water colors are used lavishly and the art itself morphs constantly to accentuate the story. From what I could notice, there were 3 distinct styles.

The writing is different from Darren Arronofsky’s films. It lacks the inherent cynicism of his films (Pi and Requiem for a Dream) and this book is filled with hope and metaphysical themes. I definitely liked the book better than the film but I think I may want to catch the film again.

10/10

www.imdb.com/title/tt0399146

This is the kind of cinema that needs to be made and seen more often; the kind that ellicits thought and emotion and incites debate.

A History of Violence is an intense and thought provoking study on the nature of violence. Tom Stall, the protagonist is thrown into a situation that forces him to unleash a side that he’d been trying to conceal even from his family. As he becomes a glorified hero by the community of his small town, he slowly becomes less repulsed by violence thereby shocking his wife and children. Soon, his otherwise apathetic and passive son resorts to violence at school.

The film is open ended and leaves a lot of questions unanswered but that is exactly what makes it such an incredible film. At the end of it, one is forced to question one’s own stance on violence, morality and redemption.

David Cronenberg’s most accessible work, at least for me.

9/10